Greeks in Azerbaijan
The Greeks in Azerbaijan have not formed a large community in comparison to those in neighbouring Georgia and Armenia. It was composed mainly of Pontic Greek immigrants from the Ottoman Empire. History Under the Russian Empire Initially, these immigrants arrived in the 1830s and settled in the village of Mehmana on the banks of the Tartar river. On 23 May 1830, the Georgian exarch appointed archpriest Vasily Andrianov to lead the religious community of Mehmana. In 1851, Trebizond-born Charalambos Koundourov (locally known as Usta Allahverdi) built two copper smelteries near Ordubad where the core staff consisted of Greek labourers. Ten years later, a school and a church for the Greek community were built there as well. The church was headed by Nikolaos Lavos. Koundourov's sons owned the smelteries after his death until the October Revolution. Local Greeks were also prominent in architecture and construction. The Saint Nicholas Church in Baku and an Orthodox church in Altiaghaj were designed and built in the 1850s by Greek architects and contractors. Greeks had not started immigrating to Baku, the present-day capital of Azerbaijan, until the oil boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Statistical records from 1886 revealed no Greek population