Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection (1980)

There are two Armenian churches in New Britain. One is St. Stephen’s Armenian Church on Tremont Street, which was consecrated in 1925. Due to a dispute among the Armenian diaspora over the church hierarchy at a time when the Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church resided in Soviet-controlled Armenia, there was a split in the Armenian Church in America in the 1930s. The Dashnak political party, which opposed Soviet rule in Armenia, formed a different wing of the church, focused on the authority of the Holy See of Cilicia, now located in Antelias, Lebanon. St. Stephen’s is part of that group, while non-Dashnaks formed a separate church. In in 1940 they purchased the former Ukrainian Hall on Irwin Place, which was consecrated as the Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection on March 19, 1941. In the late 1970s, the City of New Britain purchased the Irwin Place property for redevelopment. The church decided to erect a new building, designed by architect Ramon Hovsepian of Worcester, Massachusetts, at 1910 Stanley Street, on land it had acquired in 1969. Ground was broken on April 1, 1979 and the new church was dedicated on September 28, 1980.