Author: Ekmekjian Janet

The Bangladeshi and Armenian flags fly above the courtyard. (Photo © 2023 Robert Kurkjian)

Armen Arslanian, an Armenian from Los Angeles, had been traveling on business to Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, for many years.

On his first visit in 2010, he discovered an Armenian church. This intrigued Arslanian. After all, Bangladesh is a Muslim-majority country, and Arslanian knew that the country had no Armenian community. 

The Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection in Dhaka, Bangladesh, as seen from its rear courtyard. (Photo © 2023 Matthew Karanian)

So why would Dhaka, the capital, have an Armenian church?

Arslanian trekked out to the church, which is located in the Armentola neighborhood of Old Dhaka. At the church, Arslanian encountered an old man named Michael Martin. The encounter would lead to a friendship that would alter the church’s future.

Mr. Martin was born in Burma (now Myanmar) as Mikhael Mardirossian, and then moved to Dhaka, where he, too, made his own “discovery” of Dhaka’s Armenian church. 

When Mr. Martin arrived in Dhaka, the Armenian church was derelict and empty. The building and surrounding grounds were the last surviving relics of a centuries-old Armenian community of Bangladesh.

So Mr. Martin assumed control of the church. He took possession of it—literally. And he saved the building from destruction or, equally likely, from seizure by thieves who might want to take title to the valuable property.

Mr. Martin maintained the vacant church. He made repairs, and he stayed on the property, serving as a deterrent to those who might try to take up residence or assert ownership of an otherwise abandoned property.

Each time Arslanian returned to Dhaka on a business trip, he visited the church and reconnected with Mr. Martin.

“Mr. Martin, he was a hero,” Arslanian told me during a phone conversation a few weeks before I made my journey to Bangladesh.

“He could have taken the church and put everything in his name. But he didn’t. He was a true Armenian,” said Arslanian.

During one of his business trips to Dhaka in 2014, Arslanian arrived to discover that the elderly Mr. Martin just had a stroke. Mr. Martin knew that he would need to find someone to take over the upkeep and care of the church. 

So Mr. Martin turned to Arslanian.

Mr. Martin liked Arslanian. He trusted him. And there weren’t exactly a lot of others to whom he could turn for help. So, Mr. Martin selected Arslanian to fill that role. Arslanian has been managing the affairs of the church ever since.

I also “discovered” Bangladesh’s Armenian church when I traveled to Dhaka in February. I was in the country to serve as a policy specialist for a water project organized by Robert Kurkjian, a scientist from Pasadena, Calif. Kurkjian is executive director of Environmental Strategies International. For this project, he had partnered with the humanitarian organization Chemists Without Borders. 

Kurkjian’s project will save lives. The project tests water for the naturally-occurring arsenic that is present at elevated concentrations in many wells and is developing a water sharing program to ensure that residents of rural areas can have a supply of safe water for drinking and cooking. He developed an outreach plan to help rural residents understand the risks of arsenic poisoning and how they could avoid getting chronically ill.

In other words, Kurkjian and I were in Bangladesh for reasons other than visiting an Armenian church. But we made time to discover the church, just as Arslanian had done, more than a decade earlier.

Yes, we were drawn by our heritage to visit the site. But we also needed to answer the question: why does a country with no Armenians have a functioning Armenian church? 

For the answer, we ventured to Armentola, a neighborhood so-named because it was once a thriving Armenian community.

Some of the shops in the Armentola neighborhood are owned by the Armenian church of Dhaka and are leased to shopkeepers. The rent from the shops helps pay for the upkeep of the church.

And just across the street from these shops stood the jarring site that we had come to survey: the Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection. 

The site has its share of superlatives. It’s the only Armenian church in Bangladesh, and it’s also one of the oldest Christian sites in the country. 

Most jarring of all: the church is empty. Mr. Martin, the last surviving member of Dhaka’s Armenian community, had died a few years before our visit. 

History of the Armenian Church of Dhaka

Armenians first settled this region in the early 1700s. By 1781, they had erected the church that now stands in Dhaka, on a parcel of land that had served as Dhaka’s Armenian cemetery. Many of the tombstones from that era have survived and now flank the church.

A tombstone in the church yard that is older than the church itself. Many of the graves date back more than 200 years. (Photo © 2023 Robert Kurkjian)

The oldest of the tombstones marks the grave of an Armenian merchant named Avietes and is dated August 15, 1714. It was in this graveyard that the early Armenians of Dhaka built their first chapel. When the community grew, they razed the chapel and replaced it with the church that stands today.

At its zenith, the Armenian community had a population of about 300. Despite the community’s small size, it played a large role in business life in Dhaka, and it was influential in the city’s affairs.

The community had all but vanished by the 1980s, and eventually only Mr. Martin would remain as the church’s sole caretaker. He was also the last surviving member of the Armenian community. When he died in 2020, the day-to-day care of the church building was passed on to a local Bangladeshi, a 63-year-old man named Shankar Ghosh.

Shankar Ghosh (in striped shirt), the Hindu caretaker of the church, stands at the front gate of the church as local residents walk past. The gate opens to an alley in Old Dhaka. (Photo © 2023 Matthew Karanian)

We met Mr. Ghosh when we visited the church in February. He was warm and effusive and insisted on showing us around. We also happened to meet his adult grandson, who was also at the church that day. 

Mr. Ghosh is not Armenian. He is Hindu. His connection to this church dates back to 1985, when Mr. Martin invited him to become a live-in caretaker for the church. He’s lived there ever since.

Robert Kurkjian, an Armenian American who had traveled to Bangladesh to manage a humanitarian project, visits the church on a day off and signs the guest book. (Photo © 2023 Matthew Karanian)

On the day of our visit, Mr. Ghosh greeted us at the church gate and ushered us onto the grounds. “Sign the book. Sign the book,” he urged us, so that he could have a record of our visit in the guestbook.

Several other visitors were at the church on the day of our visit—an ordinary weekday afternoon. The church is one of Dhaka’s leading tourist spots—not that there are so many tourists in Bangladesh, but still, it’s an achievement. 

Shankar Ghosh greets a local visitor inside the church. (Photo © 2023 Robert Kurkjian)

Each week on Thursdays, the church gets hundreds of local visitors. This is the day when the church sponsors a food distribution program—a soup kitchen of sorts, for the neighborhood’s needy people. “We call it Mr. Martin’s Food Drive. Mothers come with their babies in their arms,” says Arslanian. The babies receive milk. The others receive full meals. Funding comes in part from the rent on the properties that the church owns.

Sometime soon, perhaps in the next few months, the church will receive a resident priest. “It’s a done deal,” says Arslanian. “Echmiadzin [the seat of the Armenian Church] has already agreed.”

The priest will be in residence at the church in Dhaka for most of each month, but will also be available to tend to the needs of the Armenian communities of Singapore and Myanmar. “It’s just a 40-minute flight to Myanmar,” says Arslanian. “And they already have a beautiful [Armenian] church there.”

Bringing in a resident priest will help raise the profile of the church. Arslanian says he would like the church to add an educational program for the children in the neighborhood. Even without a congregation, the resident priest will be busy with community outreach, says Arslanian.

And of course there’s also the matter of maintaining the physical structure of the church building itself. 

People from out of town are astounded that there’s a church in Bangladesh and what brilliant condition it’s in.

But for the people of Dhaka, there’s a bit less astonishment. For them, the church is an established part of the community. How established? In 2001, the Bangladesh Post Office commemorated the history of the Armenian church of Dhaka with a postage stamp. (Armenia’s post office released its own stamp 21 years later).

This was the answer to our question. Dhaka has an Armenian church because it’s part of the country’s heritage. Proud Armenians have maintained the church for more than 200 years. And the people of Dhaka have accepted the Armenians.

Robert Kurkjian and Matthew Karanian visited Dhaka’s Armenian church during a humanitarian trip to Bangladesh, where they worked on a project to bring safer water to Bangladesh’s rural communities.

Finding Bangladesh in Armenia

There’s a neighborhood in Yerevan that everyone calls Bangladesh.

It looks nothing like the country of Bangladesh. The people who live there are Armenian. And the architecture is more or less what you’d expect to see in Armenia. 

There’s also no community of Bangladeshis who live in Yerevan, certainly not in numbers that would warrant naming a community after them.

So why do Armenians refer to the Malatia-Sebastia district of Yerevan by the nickname Bangladesh?

Ask someone today in Yerevan, and they will be likely to tell you what I was told whenever I asked. The neighborhood is called Bangladesh because it’s far from the center of Yerevan, and getting there is inconvenient. 

The nickname gained traction right around the time that Bangladesh became an independent state, some fifty years ago. This has led some to speculate that the nickname was intended to honor the new republic. I’m not aware of any other newly-independent states being so honored in Armenia, so I’ll go with the far, far away theory.

For an Armenian tribute to Bangladesh that’s a bit easier to understand, look to Hay Post, the Armenian post office. They released a postage stamp last year that commemorates the Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The stamp has a face value of 320 dram, which is enough to pay the rate for mailing a letter from Yerevan to the neighborhood (but not the country) of Bangladesh.

Thirty years after the formation of the second Republic of Armenia, our country continues to face a litany of domestic economic problems. The labor sphere is in shambles. The national poverty rate is not seeing dramatic changes. Workers have little to no practical rights. Illegal and unethical child labor is rampant, and the inflation rate far outpaces any salary increases. Meanwhile, the Civil Contract government has blocked the opposition’s bill to increase the minimum wage by 50 percent.

The solution to this issue is simple: the trade union (labor union) networks of Armenia must be restructured and re-invigorated. Unfortunately, decades of overbearing Communist Party dominance in the labor sphere and marginalization of unions during the Soviet era have left contemporary Armenian trade unions weak and ineffective. They function more as advising intermediaries between the workers and the bosses, taking the side of the capitalists rather than fighting for the rights of those they represent.

What the trade unions of Armenia need is a leader – a force to organize them, revitalize them, politicize them within the context of leftist thought and defend them in case of retaliatory legal action by the bourgeois class. There is only one entity in Armenia that has the organizational know-how, the funds for legal defense and the necessary leftist philosophy to accomplish this: the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF).

This is not a role that is unfamiliar to the 132-year-old ARF. During the socialist movement of the first decade of the 20th century, the ARF organized countless strikes and created innumerable trade unions. During the era of the First Republic of Armenia, the ARF-dominated parliament often sided with the trade unions against the greedy corporatists: “in October [1920], Parliament defended the [railway] union’s position and quickly voted an extraordinary appropriation for salary increments” (Richard Hovanissian’s The Republic of Armenia).

And for those individuals for whom the solution to domestic exploitation is not a compelling issue, this is also a nationalist imperative. One can only imagine how much easier the ongoing process to remove the traitorous Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan would be if the ARF and other opposition forces were able to call a general strike. Without major influence in trade unions, such an action is not possible. Furthermore, the opposition also would have already solved or could credibly promise to solve the myriad of socio-economic issues that prevent many Armenians from thinking through a nationalist lens.

Since this appears to be an important task from both the national and social ideological standpoints, what steps must be taken toward this end?

The ARF, either by itself or in conjunction with other labor organizations, must organize the local labor unions.

The ARF’s structure naturally lends itself to this task, as its city committees (Kaghakayin Gomideh) would be able to act as local organizing liaisons. With each committee comes a host of members who have years of experience in internal democracy and organizational leadership, both at the level of the committee (gomideh) and the group (khoump). When strike action is necessary, a local body of individuals may be called upon to join the striking workers and prevent the crossing of the picket line.

Meanwhile, the provincial committees (Marzayin Gomideh) can be called upon to help organize workers by their industry, which can facilitate industry-wide strikes and widespread collective bargaining. For national-scale issues – general strikes, political action, etc. – the ARF Supreme Body of Armenia (Kerakouyn Marmin) would be the main point of contact.

The formation of a trade union organization

The organization could be fully incorporated into the structure of the ARF or function as a separate organization. The first structure was implemented in this context in 1905, with the ARF Tailors’ Union in Baku and other similar trade unions formed during that time; the second structure can be seen in organizations like the Armenian Relief Society, which have their own conventions and internal structure. The main difference is that in the first case, the ARF would direct local unions with its local structures, while in the second, it would be higher bodies (like the Supreme Body or ARF Bureau) that would direct the labor organization.

Insignia of the ARF Tailors’ Union Bureau of Baku (Source: Hratch Dasnabedian’s History of the ARF)

The best structure, however, would be that which is utilized by the ARF’s youth wings: a separate organization with local guidance and help from the ARF and nationally subordinate to the largest ARF body. Thus, the local union would be advised and aided by the city gomideh but directed by the regional branch of the ARF national Trade Union. The regional branch would be guided by the provincial ARF gomideh and directed by the national Executive Body of the trade union. The national Executive Body would be responsible to its members but also directed and aided by an ARF body (either the Supreme Body of Armenia or Bureau).

One great victory for the workers of Armenia

To revitalize the trade unions of Armenia, what is necessary is one victory for the labor movement. For instance, this might take the form of legal defense after bourgeois reprisal following strike action. This will assuage the fears of lack of legal protection that have, to this day, strangled the voice of Armenian workers, who are too fearful to engage in strikes, not because they are cowardly, but because they know that both the state and the union currently protect the interests of the bosses, not the workers. This great success will show the working class that they are protected, that they have a knight in shining armor whose name is the Tashnagtsutiun, equipped with its glorious shield of labor and its deadly sword of class and national struggle.

Of course, in the early days, it will be mostly Tashnagtsagan workers who are involved as leaders and members of the ARF-organized trade unions. However, this is not a disadvantage; on the contrary, it will allow those with genuine socialist and national ideology to flourish as organizers, preventing anti-national liberals (Nikolagans), bourgeois apologists (supporters of capitalism), and cosmopolite class reductionists (Marxist-Leninists) from reaching great heights within these labor organizations.

Though the benefits of a strong labor sphere may not manifest themselves immediately, in time, with proper leadership from the oldest Armenian democratic socialist party, the trade unions and workers will be victorious in the eternal struggle against capitalism. A “free Armenia” requires economic freedom and liberation for the Armenian working class – a process that begins with strengthening the economic power of the Armenian worker. The substitution of the Turkish yataghan–wielding feudal lord with a tricolored exploiter in Yerevan should not be mistaken for the true liberation of the Armenian people. Until a democratic and socialist Armenian republic is organized, we shall yet remain unfree.