The Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection (1781) on Church Road in Old Dhaka features a rich woven artwork of the Armenian impression on the business, legislative issues, and training of East Bengal. All the more significantly, the congregation is a building demonstration of the narrative of how the Armenian diasporas spread out from their memorable country, situated between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, to remote, and flourished as a flexible cosmopolitan network.
Armenia possesses a pivotal geographic area at the crossing point of different civilisations and exchanging courses, for example, the Silk Road from China to Rome. An indispensable connection among East and West, the nation was under the mastery of different contending political forces, including the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Persians once more, the Ottomans, and the Russians. Their long political oppression, from one perspective, made it troublesome for them to keep up their Christian confidence (the Armenians were the main individuals to hold onto Christianity as a state religion in 301 CE), language, culture, and national personality. Then again, difficult conditions urged Armenians to be strong notwithstanding political restraint, to create pioneering keenness and intervening abilities, and to be an "exchange diaspora", who learned through experience how to arrange business openings at whatever point and wherever they introduced themselves.
Considered a standout amongst the best exchanging gatherings in the Eurasian exchange circuit, the Armenians' achievement was for the most part ascribed to various key factors: their capacity to recognize areas where rivalry was moderately meager, their profound comprehension of business sectors and items, interdependency among the Armenian diasporas, their ability to flourish with low overall revenues, their political aptitudes, and capacity to effectively contend with different vendors. Wherever the Armenians went to exchange, they ordinarily took in the nearby language—in contrast to other Asian or European vendors—profiting by their ability to speak with essential makers. It was nothing unexpected that the Europeans in Bengal needed the Armenians as colleagues, and utilized them as vakils to intercede at the neighborhood court or office for their sake.
The Armenians likewise assumed a huge job ever of design. In the early medieval period, when the Byzantine world deserted traditional stonework for block workmanship (the sixth century Hagia Sophia is essentially a block development), just the Armenians held the learning of solid work and proceeded with the Hellenistic mentality to structures as a minimal, object-like impression in space. Their commitment impacted consequent improvement of chapel design in Europe.
There is no agreement on precisely when the Armenians touched base in Dhaka. A few students of history, be that as it may, recommend they were in Bengal in the mid seventeenth century, in all likelihood touching base with the southbound movement of Armenian diasporas from Persia. Amid the Safavid-Ottoman wars of 1603-1605, the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas (r. 1587-1629) extradited up to 300,000 Armenians from the Armenian commercial town of Old Julfa to what wound up known as New Julfa in the suburb of Isfahan. Since the official language of the Mughal court was Persian, the Persian-speaking Armenians could undoubtedly adjust to the life in the Mughal Empire. Being skilful at material business, the Armenians normally inclined toward Dhaka, one of the exchanging center points for fine material, contributing fundamentally to the city's business life. As per one gauge, a lot of material fare from Dhaka in 1747 is accounted for to be as vast as 23 percent of that year's complete fare, route in front of the English, the Dutch or the French in Dhaka. Notwithstanding material and crude silk, the Armenians likewise occupied with the exchange of saltpeter (utilized as explosive), salt, and betel nut. They spearheaded jute-exchanging the second 50% of the nineteenth century and promoted tea-drinking in Bengal. When they started to lose the material business to the British private dealers in the late eighteenth century, the Armenians reoriented their concentration to landholding, in the long run getting to be conspicuous and well off zamindars. Instances of Armenian zamindars in Dhaka incorporate Agha Aratoon Michael, Agha Sarkies, and Nicholas Marcar Pogose.
Another real Armenian commitment to Dhaka was the vehicle "insurgency", presenting ticca-garry or the steed carriage, the primary method of transportation in the city until the principal decade of the twentieth century. They additionally presented western-style retail establishments for European and British merchandise, including wines, spirits, stogies, bacon, perusing lights, shoes, toys, table cutlery, shaving cleanser, pots, fricasseeing container, voyaging packs, umbrellas, and so on.
The Armenian people group contributed fundamentally to Dhaka's municipal life and urban regulatory administration. Nicholas Pogose established the primary tuition based school of the city, Pogose School, in 1848. Regardless it works as a lofty school in Old Dhaka. Because of Nicholas Pogose's goals that the Dhaka Municipality Committee had no corporate substance, and that means ought to be taken to cure the issue, the British frontier organization established the District Municipality Act of 1864. The Dhaka Municipality turned into a statutory body with its legitimate ward.
Contrasted with those in Calcutta and Madras, Dhaka's Armenian people group was little however rich, applying a lot of effect on nearby and territorial organizations. It was a well-weave network, living in Armanitola, an Old Dhaka neighborhood or mahalla that was named after their state where they once lived (in spite of the fact that not all Armenians lived there). They kept up a nearby working association with the British provincial organization and other European shippers in the city, just as with their family in Kolkata. As per a 1870 study, there were 107 Armenians in Dhaka, of whom 39 were men, 23 ladies, and 45 kids. Among this gathering, there was a minister, five zamindars, three dealers, one advodate, five retailers, and four government workers.
Huge numbers of Dhaka's rich Armenians lived in European-style cottages in Old Dhaka, a standout amongst the most well known being the Ruplal House (presently in abandoned conditions) worked by the Armenian zamindar Aratoon. The religious existence of the network spun around the Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection, worked in 1781 on the vestiges of a prior house of prayer and burial ground. It is beneficial to take note of that the Armenians fabricated their first places of worship in Madras (presently Chennai) in 1547, in Agra in 1562, and in Calcutta in 1724.The Portuguese manufactured the principal church in Dhaka in 1679 and reproduced it in 1769, 10 years or so before the Armenians assembled their congregation in Old Dhaka.
It was a period of extraordinary political disturbance. At the point when Warren Hastings turned into the Governor-General of Bengal in 1773, the British pilgrim organization of the domain still stayed immature. Away in the New World, North American settlers under the administration of General George Washington vanquished the British powers driven by Lord Cornwallis at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. The political warmth was rising quickly in pre-Revolution France. In the midst of the disorganized occasions, numerous networks critically wanted to protect their national and ethnic personalities. The Armenians in Dhaka were no special case, as they looked to cement their character through the language of engineering.
The land for the Armenian Church was initially skilled by the Armenian respectable man Agha Catchick Minas, whose spouse kicked the bucket in 1764 and is covered inside the congregation. The congregation aroused the network around the Sunday mass and different religious celebrations. Later in 1840, Lt. Colonel Davidson of British Bengal Engineers gave a clear depiction of the Christmas festivity at this congregation.
The Armenian Church stands today like a peaceful and honorable landmark in the midst of the excited urban development encompassing it. Private loft towers overshadow its two-story structure and the steeple or the chime tower. The oval arrangement of the congregation is a straightforward basilica type with a twofold tallness nave flanked by two one-story, 14-foot wide arcades which open to the encompassing memorial park. The three-level ringer tower, topped with a funnel shaped rooftop, on the west gives a square-molded and angled vestibule, trailed by a formal access to the nave. Running along the east-west pivot, the nave space is intensely enunciated by five substantial docks on either side. The docks are spread over by the two entryways and windows. The focal processional path of the nave is flanked by columns of wooden seats, making a direct movement of room toward a semi-round apse. The eastern end of the nave is outwardly encircled by a tall curve, behind which is the anticipating apse containing a raised special raised area. A10-foot tall wooden special stepped area piece there contains an imaginative delineation of the Last Supper. Two indistinguishable havens, open from the nave, flank the apse. Situated over the rooftop line of the passageways, sky facing windows along the nave dividers, bring light somewhere inside the congregation. On the left as one enters the nave space, there is a roundabout, wooden staircase rising to the second floor display disregarding the nave, and after that to the third floor of the tower.
In spite of the fact that the style of the congregation appears to be to some degree mixed at initial, a closer review uncovers that its typology depends on run of the mill highlights of Armenian church design. The ringer tower's ribbed tapered steeple, surmounted with a cross, is normal to understood instances of Armenian houses of worship. They include: the Cathedral of Holy Etchmiadzinnear Yerevan in Armenia (initially inherent the fourth century and reconstructed in its present structure in the seventeenth century; this is viewed as the most established church on the planet); St. Hripsime in Echmiadzin, Armenia (modified in 618 CE); the Armenian Church on Lake Van in the East Anatolia Province, Turkey (tenth century); and the Armenian Church (1924) close to the Howrah Bridge in Kolkata. These precedents have the paradigmatic "drum-and-cone design," that motivated Dhaka's Armenian Church. The curved base of its chime tower that goes about as a pronaos for the congregation legitimate is basic to every one of the precedents referenced above aside from the one in East Anatolia. The roundabout windows confronting cardinal headings that we find on the steeple of the Dhaka church are strikingly like those of the Armenian Church in Kolkata. An intriguing component of the congregation with regards to Old Dhaka is the manner by which its spire is offset on the east, where the balustrade on the nave rooftop finishes in a Baroque crown-like detail with a cross to finish everything and a curved opening at the inside.
The high limit divider around the Armenian Church in Dhaka shields the property from uncontrolled land theory that portrays the capital city today. The fundamental access to the site is from the east close to the round apse. Guests must stroll through the burial ground the whole distance toward the western forecourt of the congregation. Perusing the headstones of the cemetery feels like an adventure back to when the Armenians assumed essential jobs in the life of the city. The congregation, alongside its serious memorial park, amidst boisterous city life, appears like a noble and to some degree melancholic image of an inaccessible past.
It is to some degree amusing that there is a spot (informally) called Bangladesh in the suburb of the Armenian capital city of Yerevan. The area's genuine name is Malatia-Sebastia, named after the cutting edge Turkish urban areas of Malatya and Sivas. The responses to why this somewhat ruined rural Armenian town is called Bangladesh is both slippery and antagonistic. It relies upon who you inquire. Some think, rather disparagingly, that it is called Bangladesh as an equivalent word for the town's remoteness, mental separation, destitution, and scourged monetary scene. However, a few people find the starting point of this impossible name in the sympathy the Armenian individuals felt for Bangladesh in 1971, when Bengalis turned into the casualties of Pakistani military's destructive crusade. There is no suburb of Yerevan called Pakistan!
There is one normal story that slices through all these unique stories. The human story, or history, can't be explained with the lost soul of country anti-extremism. We, the general population of the world, are interconnected in a wide range of startling ways. History ought to be written such that it features our mutual encounters, lived and envisioned. Chronicles of Bangladesh, for instance, can never be categorized inside its cutting edge political limits. Probably the best wellsprings of Bangladeshi history are found in England, Holland, and Portugal, among different spots.
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