Armenian merchants were established in Bengal well before the Company. There is a gravestone in the churchyard dated 1630, sixty years before Job Charnock landed, and it is the single strongest piece of evidence against the idea that Charnock founded the city.
The present church was built in 1724 on the site of an earlier wooden chapel that burned down. Agha Nazar funded it. The spire was added in 1734 and carries a clock donated in 1790 that still works.
The community was large, wealthy and philanthropic: it built the Armenian College in 1821, which still operates and still draws students from Armenia and Iran. The congregation in Kolkata is now very small.
Services are held in Armenian. The interior is plain, whitewashed and cool, with a marble floor made of gravestones, and it is one of the quietest rooms in Burrabazar.
What the guidebook leaves out
The 1630 gravestone of Rezabeebeh. It is the physical evidence that there was a settled trading community here two generations before the Company.
