The Irrawaddy News Magazine, Burma
Nov 23 2013
Tracing the Last of Burma’s Once Influential Armenians
By ALICE FOSTER / THE IRRAWADDY
RANGOON – A hand-drawn map showed the way to the colonial teak house
that my Armenian grandmother’s family left behind when the Japanese
captured Rangoon in 1942.
My relatives are thought to have hidden jewels in the well before
fleeing the family home that was reportedly turned into a brothel
during the Japanese occupation.
Last month, more than 70 years later, I took up the map drawn by my
great-uncle from memory and returned to the house down by the railway
lines near Lanmadaw station in Rangoon.
The street names have changed and a high-ranking government official
has taken up residence in the large house, which was confiscated by
the military sometime after the 1962 coup that marked the beginning of
nearly a half century of authoritarian rule.
A decade ago the house was tightly guarded and photographs were
prohibited, but now the restrictions have eased.
The official’s sister and a maid gingerly let me into the locked
garden, but not the house because the government official, said to be
a director for education, was out. Looking at my black and white
family photographs, his sister said: `I’m amazed. There are still
people very much interested in this old house.’
The maid, standing by the overgrown well, said the previous occupants
did not eat beef inside the house because they were superstitious.
Some people have said it is haunted.
But she said: `I have never had any experience of ghosts.’
My late grandmother, Norma Gregory, grew up in Rangoon and lived with
her mother and father, who was a barrister, together with three older
brothers and several dogs.
The Gregorys were among a number of Armenians who had professions and
commercial interests in Burma under British rule but fled before the
Japanese captured Rangoon during World War II.
As part of the evacuation Norma, just 18, traveled to India, joined
the army and later moved to London where she met my grandfather at a
dance. She never returned to Burma.
Her parents did go back to the house in Rangoon but left for good when
the military, led by former dictator Gen Ne Win, confiscated it.
Last month, in an attempt to trace my family history, I went to the
150-year-old Armenian Apostolic Church of St John the Baptist on Bo
Aung Kyaw Street in Rangoon.
Its priest, Reverend John Felix, who invited me for tea, said there
used to be hundreds of Armenian families in Burma but there are now
very few left, as a result of the upheavals in the country over the
decades. When he took over the church in 2011, he only knew two
Armenian families.
`I said, I must do something,’ the Rev Felix told me. `I started to
search and talk to people as much as I can. I learned that Armenians
used to have positions with official status.’
In the 17th century, a Persian shah uprooted many thousands of
Armenians from the region of Julfa in their homeland and deported them
to his new capital in modern day Isfahan, Iran. Ambitious young
traders from the diaspora then traveled to India and Southeast Asia.
As the Armenian community established itself in Burma, a few of the
most powerful merchants became advisors to Burmese kings and acted as
go-betweens with the British.
After the British colonized Burma, my great-great-grandfather Chater
Gregory moved to Rangoon from Calcutta in India, where Anglo-Armenian
relations were traditionally close.
Rev Felix said that a number of Armenians ran large companies and
built monuments, an airport and a fire brigade tower in Rangoon.
`When the British ruled, they were very much trusted,’ he said. `They
got major building contracts and positions in customs. They
contributed to the development of Myanmar.’
In 1901, Armenian brothers Aviet and Tigran Sarkies opened the Strand
Hotel as part of a luxury hotel chain including the Raffles Hotel in
Singapore.
My great-grandfather is said to have drunk there after a day’s work at
the courtroom nearby.
Rev Felix took me to visit Armenian Ralf Gregory, 94, who was once a
signaler in the British Army, got the last train out of Rangoon before
its capture in 1942 and was later taken hostage by the Japanese.
Gregory, a frail man with the same surname and accent as my
great-uncle, was born just four years before my grandmother but said
he did not know my family.
At his home in Rangoon, he said that he is proud to be one of the few
people with Armenian heritage left in Burma, where sometimes he is
mistaken for a Jew.
He said: `I don’t feel lonely, I depend on God. I pray morning and
night, I pray for everybody, I leave nobody out.’
When invited to celebrate the church’s 150th anniversary, he said: `If
I am in good health I will go. I am almost blind and I have to wear
this [visor] to keep away the light.’
Rev Felix said that Gregory’s Armenian school friend Basil Martin,
chairman of the board of trustees at the church and a respected figure
whose family ran a company, died in May.
At the start of the year, Burma established diplomatic ties with
Armenia and more Armenians could soon begin to arrive as the country
opens up.
If nothing else, Rev Felix hopes the changes will bolster the
congregation of his church, which sees about 10 people attend its
weekly Sunday morning service.
http://www.irrawaddy.org/feature/tracing-last-burmas-influential-armenians.html