Although the Society began its work supporting the Schools, colleges and outreach work of American missionaries in Turkey, its work soon spread to other areas of the Near East, most notably Syria and Egypt. In those countries it also supported schools and training institutions founded by British and American missions as well as medical missionaries who by the second half of the nineteenth century were beginning to open clinics and hospitals in the region.

In 1895/96, a wave of massacres of the Armenians in Turkey shocked the world. Three hundred thousand people were murdered, and in partnership with the American missionaries, the Society, which had changed its name to the BibleLands Missions Aid Society, became involved in a huge relief effort that included support for orphanages that became home to thousands of Armenian children.

In the Balkans, still part of the Ottoman Empire, as the people struggled for national liberation, the Society provided relief programmes for the victims of Turkish retaliation and ethnic strife, and in Macedonia it opened an orphanage of its own at Monastir. The success of the Society's work in the Balkans, led the British Government to ask it to take responsibility during the Great War for relief among the civilian population of Serbia, Britain's war-time ally.

In 1915, under cover of the Great War, Turkey attempted to rid itself finally of its Armenian population. Armenian young men were murdered in cold-blood while women, children and old people were forced to walk in enormous human convoys, sometimes for months at a time, across Anatolia into the deserts of northern Syria. Most of them died en route. Those who survived were herded into outdoor concentration camps where thousands more perished. BibleLands supported work among the survivors, in schools, training centres, medical clinics and churches, which was the basis of much of its work in Lebanon today.

Between the World Wars: 1918 – 1939
At the end of the Great War, hundreds of thousands of homeless and traumatised people were scattered all across the Balkans and the Middle East. Their numbers were swollen as thousands of Greeks and Armenians fled from a series of atrocities perpetrated against their people by Turkey, in Cilicia in 1921, and in Smyrna in 1922. For most of them, their final refuge was a shack in a squalid refugee camp or a poor room in a city slum, and 20 years later, most of those who survived were still there. BibleLands supported the Christian workers, western and local, who worked in the camps, as doctors, nurses and teachers, as evangelists and Bible women, who devoted their lives to the refugees. On the eve of the Second World War, when the Sanjak of Alexandretta was ceded by France to Turkey, thousands more Armenians joined their fellow countrymen in the refugee camps of Lebanon and Syria

Elsewhere in the region, work that BibleLands had first supported nearly a century earlier continued. In Palestine, Syria and Egypt, Christian evangelism went on alongside educational and medical work, while in Bulgaria, the Society rescued the famous Samokov Institute from threatened closure and reopened it as the Bulgarian Bible School. It became known as the Gospel Power House of the Balkans, and for ten years, until 1939, it helped train the generation of Christian men and women who kept the Christian faith alive in Eastern Europe through the second part of the twentieth century.

Modern Times
During the Second World War, a group of British servicemen based in Palestine, began supporting the Mission to the Blind in Bible Lands founded by British missionary, Mary Lovell, in the closing years of the nineteenth century. When they returned to Britain, they became associated with the Bible Lands Missions Aid Society, and eventually, one of those servicemen, Bob Clothier, became its secretary and integrated the Mission to the Blind into existing programmes. He was also instrumental in initiating work among disabled groups as well as among sufferers from leprosy. But, another refugee crisis, this time among the Palestinians who fled their homes following the birth of the state of Israel in 1948, led to hundreds of thousands more people becoming recipients of aid programmes supported by BibleLands. In 1974, the Society also aided refugees on the Island of Cyprus after an invasion by Turkey, while throughout the Lebanon civil war that lasted from 1975 to the early 1990s, it supported new relief programmes as well as maintaining its existing work.

Today, as it maintains the work of 150 years, the Society, now called BibleLands, supports 50+ Christian led projects throughout the lands of the Bible. In Israel and the Occupied Territories, Lebanon and Egypt, where our Christian Partners follow in the footsteps of many heroic Christian men and women, and in the footsteps of Jesus himself, they continue to tend, treat and teach the young, the sick and the needy, regardless of faith or nationality.

A page from the first
Annual Report
(1855)

Macedonian
Massacre Relief
(1904)

Dr Ruth Parmalee
American missionary
doctor in Turkey and
founder of American
Women's Hospital
at Salonica.
(c.1925)

The Light Bearers
The story of BibleLands, which is in itself a story of Christian work in the Balkans and Middle East for 150 years, is told in The Light Bearers by Jean Hatton, published in May 2003 by Monarch Books. It is available from Christian booksellers, or online from the BibleLands cards and gifts pages, or by emailing Heather Taylor at BibleLands or calling her on 01494 897933.