Dynastic History|Vank Cathedral, New Julfa — The Town That Was Moved to Isfahan

In the autumn of 1603 Abbas I ordered the demolition of Old Julfa, an Armenian merchant town on the river Aras, as part of a scorched-earth withdrawal intended to deny supplies to an advancing Ottoman army. Its population was driven across the river into Iran between 21 October and 19 November 1604. That date range comes from Arakel of Tabriz, an Armenian chronicler: for this episode the surviving narrative belongs to the deportees, not to the court. Figures of around 400,000 for the wider deportation circulate in the literature; they descend from chronicle testimony and are estimates, not counts.

Many died in the first winter at Khalkhal, Ahar and Meshkin. Julfa's merchants fared differently, and the difference was policy rather than mercy: they were given notice, permitted to carry moveable wealth, and provided with transport. The crown wanted the silk trade to arrive intact. By the summer of 1605 they had been settled on royal domain land on the right bank of the Zayandarud, at what became New Julfa.

The terms were specific. In 1619 Abbas declared silk export a crown monopoly and granted Armenian merchants the right to carry Iranian raw silk to Europe. The quarter elected its own kalāntar from among its ward headmen, confirmed by royal decree, who collected its taxes and stood between it and arbitrary levies. Travellers counted the result rather than censused it: Chardin, in Isfahan between 1666 and 1676, reckoned 3,400 to 3,500 families and about 30,000 people; Fryer in 1677 put it above 6,000 families.

The cathedral on this site is dated to 1606 in some accounts and to 1655 in others, and the building took its present form in works carried out between 1655 and 1664. It holds a library of more than seven hundred manuscripts and a museum of the quarter's documents, including farmans issued by Abbas I. A memorial to the Armenian genocide stands in the courtyard.

📸 Cover: Vank Cathedral, Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.