Surp Karapet Church and the Armenian Cemetery

The pointed dome rises above the church in the middle of the Armenian Cemetery. Avenues from the western and southern gates lead to its doors, and a deceased person was escorted here between family plots. The church had no ordinary parish: it served the cemetery itself. Later, Surp Karapet Church became the only active Armenian church on the Don, while the former almshouse and service buildings survived nearby.

In eighteen seventy-one, the Nakhichevan-on-Don noblewoman Akyuline Pogosovna Aladzhalova disposed of her estate as though she were drawing up a plan for this site. Her money was held in a bank and earned interest. After its owner’s death, the capital was to be spent on a stone church in the middle of the Armenian Cemetery, a trustees’ house, a well, and several houses for poor Armenian families with nowhere to live.

The cemetery had long received the dead by then, but it had no church of its own. Aladzhalova required that the church be dedicated to John the Baptist. The Armenian name Surp Karapet means Holy Forerunner: this is what they call the preacher who announced Christ’s coming and baptized Him. Documents do not explain why Aladzhalova chose this particular saint.

She herself died at the age of sixty-two, before construction began. Three executors had to carry out her instructions—people to whom she had entrusted her capital and the precise fulfillment of her will. Only four years later did they submit a petition to the city administration. The benefactress’s nephew, Ivan Khatranov, took charge of supervising the work. The builders laid the foundations of the church in eighteen seventy-five and completed it six years later. The church was consecrated on June eleventh, eighteen eighty-one.

It had no parish of its own: it was built for the cemetery. That is why the main avenues from the western and southern gates converge at the church doors, while family plots form rectangular blocks around it. Funeral processions came here not from a city street, but through rows of graves. Under the same will, an almshouse was established nearby, intended for the permanent residence of sixty elderly and homeless people. Here, they cared for those being buried and for those who still needed shelter, water, and care.

In nineteen thirty-eight, the church was closed, and the cemetery was left without services. Three years later, worship resumed. The other Armenian churches of former Nakhichevan-on-Don were later demolished, and the cemetery church, which had previously had no parish of its own, remained the only active Armenian church on the Don. Services are held here again today, while the buildings of the former almshouse and the church service buildings remain as parts of a single complex.

Akyuline Aladzhalova is buried by the church’s southwestern wall. Her original gravestone disappeared; for many years, the grave remained unnamed until the monument was restored. It again bears her surname, her maiden name Khatryan, and the year of her death—ten years before the consecration of the church she paid for.