The glorious April 1876 Uprising of the Bulgarian people ended in defeat, but it became a prelude to the people's liberation. In the summer and early autumn of 1876 the Bulgarian question became the central issue in the long drawn-out Eastern Question — that about the destiny of the Balkan peoples enslaved by Turkey and about the fate of the Ottoman Empire itself. In spite of their close proximity to the Ottoman capital and the fact that they lived on the crossroads of the Empire's vital arteries among compact masses of Turkish colonists, the Bulgarians had had the courage to rise in a desperate, resolute struggle to overthrow the unbearable foreign rule. This earned them the sympathy and admiration of the other European nations.

The Turkish authorities did their best to obliterate all traces of their inhuman atrocities in crushing the uprising, but the traces were so numerous and so horrible that even the little which was seen by foreign diplomats and jour-nalists was sufficient to arouse the profound indignation of world democratic public opinion. Knyaz Tseretelev, Russia's vice-consul in Plovdiv, Eugene Schuyler, secretary of the United States embassy in Constantinople, and J. MacGahan, special correspondent of the British paper Daily News, undertook in early July, i. e. two months after the uprising, an investigation in the regions of Southern Bulgaria, which had risen.

Hasty glance

"What we saw there (Batak)". MacGahan wrote."was too frightful for more than a hasty glance… It was a fearful sight — a sight to haunt one through life. There were little curly heads there in that festering mass, crushed down by heavy stones… little baby hands stretched out as if for help; babies that had died wondering at the bright gleam of sabres and the red hands of the fierce-eyed men who wielded them; children who had died shrinking with fright and terror; young girls who had died weeping and sobbing and begging for mercy; mothers who died trying to shield their little ones with their own weak bodies, all lying there together, festering in one horrid mass."

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