Category: 2023

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.

The negotiations between Azerbaijan and the self-proclaimed Nagorno Karabakh Republic have been one of the most discussed topics since the end of the 2020 Nagorno Karabakh war. The international community believes that these negotiations can help find a long-term solution to the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, while the Armenian government has agreed to separate Armenia-Azerbaijan relations from the issue of the future of Nagorno Karabakh. Armenia insists that a special international mechanism should be established for Azerbaijan-Nagorno Karabakh contacts. At the same time, Azerbaijan rejects this option, claiming that no international involvement is necessary for the Azerbaijani government to speak with representatives of the Armenian minority in Azerbaijan. The self-proclaimed Nagorno Karabakh Republic rejects the “Azerbaijan-Armenian minority” framework of talks, arguing that talks should be conducted within the international mechanism and between two entities: Azerbaijan and the Nagorno Karabakh Republic.

Since the end of the war, several meetings took place between representatives of Azerbaijan and the Nagorno Karabakh Republic focused on technical and humanitarian issues. Azerbaijan’s decision to impose a blockade on Nagorno Karabakh and to lose the Lachin road have created additional obstacles for any meaningful negotiations. In recent months, Azerbaijan put forward another demand to resume contacts: the dismissal of Nagorno Karabakh state minister Ruben Vardanyan. President Aliyev reiterated this position at the Munich Security Conference. The removal of Vardanyan seemed to open the way for the resumption of talks. Two meetings took place on February 24 and March 1, 2023, facilitated by the Russian peacekeepers. Azerbaijan appointed a special envoy for these talks. However, four days after the last meeting, Azerbaijani special forces ambushed and killed three police officers near the Azerbaijan-Nagorno Karabakh line of contact. This vicious attack casts doubts on Azerbaijani’s intentions to resolve the Nagorno Karabakh conflict peacefully.

Meanwhile, after a three-month break, Armenia-Azerbaijan negotiations were resumed at the Munich Security Conference. Discussions are underway to organize a new meeting within the Brussels format. The future of Nagorno Karabakh is one of the critical issues which should be discussed and agreed upon. In recent months, the Armenian government has made significant steps to facilitate the peace process. In April 2022, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated that Armenia is considering the possibility of lowering the bar of Nagorno Karabakh status, apparently hinting that Armenia may abandon its long-term position that Nagorno Karabakh cannot exist under Azerbaijani jurisdiction. Since the summer of 2022, Armenian officials have stopped the usage of the term “status,” emphasizing the necessity to ensure the rights and security of Nagorno Karabakh Armenians. The international community accepted this approach, pushing forward the idea that status is not the mandatory condition for providing security and protecting the rights of Nagorno Karabakh Armenians. The Azerbaijani government also pushed forward this option, claiming that it is ready to provide the same rights to the Armenians as to other ethnic groups in Azerbaijan.

However, this vision, according to which Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh may enjoy rights and security under Azerbaijani jurisdiction without any status, has several systematic flaws. First of all, it does not consider the 35 years of conflict and anti-Armenian propaganda, which was and is widespread in Azerbaijan. Since many Azerbaijanis perceive Armenians as existential enemies, it is challenging to assume that by some miracle, Azerbaijani society will eliminate the effects of this propaganda. To achieve this result, Azerbaijan should stop spreading hatred toward Armenians and launch a long-term information campaign to overcome the results of anti-Armenian propaganda, which may take decades to provide tangible results.

The state-spread anti-Armenian hatred is not the only obstacle to implementing this vision. Azerbaijan is an authoritarian state, and this is not an Armenian estimate. This is an assessment of all international organizations, like Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and others. Azerbaijan systematically violates the fundamental rights of Azerbaijani citizens, regardless of their ethnic origin. In the recently published Freedom in the World 2023 report, Freedom House again rated Azerbaijan as a “Not Free” country, giving it only nine points out of 100. In the current environment, arguing or hoping that the Azerbaijani government is able or ready to provide necessary rights to the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh is not realistic. If implemented, this approach will result in the hard or soft ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Nagorno Karabakh. Any country or organization pushing forward for such a solution will bear responsibility for such an outcome.

One should argue for fundamental changes in the Azerbaijani state system and state institutions before discussing the possibility of providing security and rights to Armenians under Azerbaijani jurisdiction. If it ever starts, this process of substantial reforms in Azerbaijan will take years, if not decades, to transform the country and bring it closer to basic democratic standards. Until this happens, the only option to prevent the hard or soft ethnic cleansing of Armenians living in Nagorno Karabakh is the solid and permanent international presence in Nagorno Karabakh, which should continue after the expiration of the Russian peacekeepers’ initial mandate in November 2025.

Red, blue and orange bolts of cloth at various metro Philadelphia JoAnn fabric stores were recently transformed into a 30-yard-long Armenian tricolor banner through the work of four women who accepted the challenge to create the symbol of Armenian freedom and resistance for last month’s Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) Eastern Region protest to cut US military aid to Azerbaijan.

The idea to include a tricolor banner at the February 2 Washington, DC protest was inspired by recent mobilizations in Artsakh and Armenia featuring yards-long banners of red, blue and orange, sewn together and lifted toward the sky by demonstrators to put the Aliyev regime and its aiders and abettors on notice that efforts to strip Artsakh’s people of their protected self-determination rights will be resisted.

Stepanakert, December 25, 2022 (Photo: Weekly contributor Vahagn Khachatrian)

ARF Central Committee member Sevag Shirozian volunteered to investigate the price and logistics of ordering the tricolor for the protest from a commercial vendor and concluded that there might be a better way to avoid cost and timing issues if he turned to a reliable contact for the work: his wife Taline.

“I was upstairs in my bedroom,” Taline recalled. “He texted me the information and asked, ‘Can we do this?’” When Sevag informed Taline of the desired size of the banner envisioned, her first reaction was, “No, what are you talking about?”

Her second reaction was, “Let me think about it.”

Taline conducted her own online investigation of fabric options and drove to a local fabric store to see and feel the cloth. She settled on a satin-looking polyester material and informed her husband, “Okay, maybe with your mom and aunts, I can do this. If we can do something, let’s do it.”

With less than a week to work on the banner, Taline began the fabric gathering process, spending nearly six hours driving to five JoAnn fabric stores to amass the quantity of red, blue and orange cloth needed for the project.

With her mother-in-law Anahid Shirozian, Taline spent an evening sizing and cutting the fabric. The following day, they went to their old dry cleaning and alteration store to use the industrial sewing machine that Anahid had operated for years when the business was still open.

“At the beginning, it was just me and mom,” said Taline. “Then, the horkours heard about the process and said they wanted to help too.” Mary Shirozian Hatsakordzian and Vartouhi Shirozian Koumroukian joined Taline and Anahid for a six-hour day to start sewing the red, blue and orange cloth panels together. A final eight-hour day was spent at the shop to finish sewing the banner, and then pressing and winding it onto a roller for safe transport to Washington, DC. Taline estimated that the entire banner project took 20 hours to complete.

“From the first minute, my answer to help was ‘yes,’” said Anahid Shirozian, remembering her daughter-in-law’s call for help. “I respect the flag. This is my responsibility. We still have the store and the machines, so we were able to go there and do the work. I knew it was being used for an important purpose.”

Mary Shirozian Hatsakordzian, Vartouhi Shirozian Koumroukian and Anahid Shirozian hard at work on the Armenian flag (Photo: Sevag Shirozian)

“My sisters-in-law came to help because we needed more than two people for the ironing and folding,” she continued. “It wasn’t work for just two people. The flag has always had an important part in our lives and we have always displayed it in our home. It is the same for my children and grandchildren. It was a great honor to do this work. It was a joy.”

At the protest site outside the US Capitol, Taline stood before the gathering crowd and watched protesters slowly unwind the tricolor banner and take their place to hold it front and center.

“From the first moment, I looked at it and told them not to let it hit the ground,” she said. “I think it was new to see a banner of this size for the people who were there. It was the first time they were holding something like that.”

“We see in Armenia that type of long flag, but we don’t see it here,” added Koumroukian. “We were very glad to help with this. Taline and Anahid were brave to take on this project, and we were there to help.”

ANCA Eastern Region brings together hundreds of activists for Artsakh, February 2, 2023 (Photo: Sevag Shirozian)

The impact of seeing the finished product of their labor also deeply touched the four women, because the protest was occurring on the death anniversary of Kevork Shirozian – their father-in-law, husband or brother – who died unexpectedly two years ago.

“I thought, ‘My brother loved the flag,’” Hatsakordzian recalled. “When he got sick, it hurt me so much. I thought, ‘I should do this in his memory.’ That’s when I decided that whatever expense there was, I would donate it.”

Hatsakordzian’s promise to herself was fulfilled when her nephew Sevag recently delivered his aunt’s $1,000 check to the ARF Central Committee office without fanfare.

“I said I would go and stand in his place in Washington,” she added, remembering the cold day in February at the protest. 

“I’m 80 years old, and I wonder now, ‘How did we do that work?’ But at the protest, it was a proud moment to see the tricolor being used, and I was satisfied. My heart was at peace that I could help.”