Albert Limerick Long was born on December 4, 1832, in Washington, Pennsylvania. He was educated at Western University of Pennsylvania and at Alleghany College, Meadville, Pennsylvania. He also studied at the Concord Biblical Institute (now University of Boston). At the age of 24, he graduated with awards for his theological education and was invited to become a missionary to the Methodist Episcopal Church and to move to the Balkans. He accepted, and on June 27, 1857, he departed for the Ottoman Empire. During the three-month-long journey by ship, Long intensively studied Bulgarian. He used the first Bulgarian textbook for foreigners "Notes on Bulgarian Grammar", written by another missionary Elias Riggs. After his arrival, he settled in Shumen, now in Bulgaria, and began studying Greek and Turkish. Long befriended with the local intelligentsia. Two years later he moved to Tarnovo. In 1859 he established a Bulgarian Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1863 he moved to Constantinople, the Ottoman capital, to become the overseer of the Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church for Bulgarian lands. He was one of the greatest advocates before the Ottoman authorities in favor of the Armenian cause during the massacre of 75,000 Armenians in 1896, part of the Hamidian massacres. Long personally translated the records of Archimandrite Metodi Kusev detailing the atrocities of the suppression of the 1876 April Uprising in Bulgaria and handed them over to a reporter of the Daily News. Again, he urged the US Consul General in Istanbul, Eugene Schuyler, to visit the town of Batak and to assure the credibility of the information about the Batak massacre. The actions of these men helped to form a "casus belli" for the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War, which led to Bulgarian liberation.