Ever since I can remember, my father Diran Chakelian was always an active and respected figure of the London Armenian community. From the video footage I’ve seen of him as a young man with an impressively bushy moustache marrying my mother at the St. Sarkis church in Kensington to getting stuck into juicy lamb kofte (or “Armenian hamburger” as he nicknamed it to entice us half-British children!) at summer barbecues in dusty west London school playgrounds, he taught me the importance of nurturing my roots.
He also mixed his enduring support for the Armenian Institute as a trustee – including donating books from our shelves at home (which resembled a veritable Armenian archive in themselves) to its library – with teaching multiple year groups of young western Armenians at the K Tahta Sunday School (even shocking some of the elders by allowing my class to play our own rap-metal song about the Armenian Genocide at our graduation hantess).
Juggling so many roles made him well-known for his dedication to keeping our corner of the diaspora creative, fun and thriving. He had also been a patron of the Armenian International Magazine, a director at the Centre for Armenian Information and Advice, and trustee of the B Kassardjian Sis Trust.
Yet perhaps what best demonstrated his commitment to keeping Armenian heritage and tradition alive was his rather ambitious business venture of 2001: boxes of wooden building blocks for children to build into models of famous Armenian churches. He partnered with a professor of architecture to create the designs, and the blocks were manufactured in Armenia. Armenian Institute regulars may remember him proudly manning a stand at the vernissage, surrounded by stacks of build-your-own Echmiadzins, Shushis, Karmravors and Arudches, with a few he’d built earlier displayed on a red table cloth.
I used to joke that he should have pitched the product on the Apprentice or Dragons’ Den – but while they may never have been a commercial hit, you will still find these lovingly-designed blocks in the toy cupboards of many Armenian children’s centres and nurseries in Britain and abroad. Since he died in 2018, I have started my own tradition of building these churches to display under my Christmas tree: the perfect tribute to a man who brought such imagination and energy to the Armenian Institute and wider London Armenian world for so many years.
Anoosh Chakelian