Building a community in Naples, Florida
The Neapolitan Armenians: When two of them meet, see if they will not create a new Armenia
by Paul Chaderjian
NAPLES, Florida – Florida in the American lexicon equates to recreation, retirement, rest, and relaxation. Among the top dozen destinations that are known around the world is a small city of an estimated 22,000 residents on the western coast of the Sunshine State. This city, in Collier County, earned its name thanks to its reputation for overshadowing the original Bay of Naples, Italy. The accolades Naples, Florida, has earned include consistently being named as one of the top five places to live in the U.S. Its ten-mile beach on the Gulf of Mexico has been named the best beach in the U.S. The city is also known as the Golf Capital of the World and boasts more than 80 championship golf courses.
Naples is where people who value serenity, beauty, cleanliness – paradise - come to vacation or spend their retirement years. Among those who have a residence here are Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Steven Spielberg, and Armenian-American philanthropist Gerard L. Cafesjian, a former executive of West Law Publishing, who created the Cafesjian Family Foundation and owns and operates the Armenian Reporter.
Like Gerard and Cleo Cafesjian, who spent decades working hard, raising a family, succeeding in business, and realizing their American Dream in big metropolitan, concrete jungles, many others come to Southwest Florida to enjoy every moment of a vacation or their retirement years. It’s a place to enjoy the good life, a wonderfully temperate climate, nice people, great shopping, and good food.
More than two hundreds Armenian families are known to have residences in Naples and interact with other Armenians through two local organizations. The first, established more than a decade ago, is the Armenian American Cultural Society of South West Florida (AACS). The second organization is the Armenian Church of Southwest Florida, whose parish mission in Naples organizes monthly celebrations of the Divine Liturgy and hosts its visiting mission priest, Fr. Nerses Jebejian.
Mark from Marco Island
This weekend, the first character in this story of Southwest Floridians, 84-year-old Mark Nahabedian, will be among American soldiers being honored by the French Embassy with a Chevalier Award for being part of the forces that liberated France toward the end of the Second World War. Mr. Nahabedian served in the American army in France from 1944 to 1945.
In 1970, Mark decided to buy a vacation place in the Naples-Marco Island area. He and his wife, Helen, and their three daughters lived in Morton Grove, outside Chicago, at the time. Mark operated a flooring business and owned a carpet-tile supply company. He would eventually occupy himself full-time investing and managing properties.
When the family still lived outside Chicago, Mark and his family would vacation in Miami but found the east coast of Florida too crowded.
Flash forward a few decades, and Mark has become a central figure in the local community while his youngest daughter, Carrie Nahabedian, is a world-famous chef who has held executive-chef posts at the Four Seasons and Ritz Carlton hotels. Carrie now runs her own restaurant, Naha, in Chicago, and has garnered a number of prestigious accolades – including the 2008 James Beard Foundation Award for best chef in the Great Lakes region – as well as rave reviews from national and international publications, among them her hometown’s Chicago Tribune.
While the family had discussed looking for a vacation home in Florida, Mark surprised his wife and daughters one Sunday in 1970 by buying an apartment site unseen.
“Normally, I’m the one who goes to church, but I stayed home that Sunday while they went to church and was looking through the travel and properties sections of the paper,” he says. “I saw an ad for a place in Marco Island, and I said, ‘Gee, that sounds great.’”
After seeing photos of the apartment, Mark signed on the dotted line, and the family took up residence in their new vacation home in 1971.
“We spent Christmas and Easter here, and then I got my brother down here, and I got my sister down here, and I got my niece down here,” he says. “There are about ten Armenian families that came here because of me, and then I’ve got two other cousins that live here. So, next thing you know, they’re coming in from all over, most of them from New England, and two from the Michigan area.
Enter Maida and her Midas touch
Maida and her husband, John Domenie, moved to Naples from New Jersey in 1987, and launched the AACS in 1998.
Maida grew up in Beirut and left for Europe in 1963 at the age of 25. At the time she was employed by an Armenian who manufactured household products and asked her to work for him in Switzerland. Her father had passed away, so Maida, her brother, and mother moved to Switzerland but didn’t like life in Europe.
“I said, ‘Let’s go back to Beirut and see what we can do about going to America,” she remembers. “We waited for two years to be cleared to come to the United States, and we finally did. Then my husband hired me when we came to Washington, DC, where I had two cousins.”
John Domenie was working for a start-up bank called Wells Fargo, and he interviewed Maida for a position at the company. Maida says they developed a very deep friendship and then decided to get married.
“After my husband took early retirement, he said, ‘We shouldn’t live in the New Jersey-New York area anymore,” says Maida. “I’m asthmatic, and the cold affects me very much. So we got into our car, and we were driving along the coast, because we wanted to be by the water.”
Maida and John had not heard about Naples until they were visiting a cousin in Boca Raton, on the east coast of Florida.
“We saw this little town that said Naples on the map,” she remembers. “It’s a good drive across the state, so we said, ‘Let’s go and see it.’ And that was love at first sight.”
After about ten years in Naples, Maida realized that she and John were running into other Armenians now and again.
“My husband said, ‘Why don’t you look further into this, because there must be quite a few Armenians if we are seeing and meeting them so often,’” says Maida. “Eleven years ago, we came across some other Armenians, and I was very impressed by their Armenianness. One person said, ‘When do you think we’ll have a club or a church?’ That really triggered my interest, and I sat down for days and days, went over the telephone book, found all the ians, and I wrote maybe 150 letters.”
Maida received 35 prompt responses from fellow Neapolitan Armenians who said they would be interested in an Armenian club. She said the response was very encouraging, and the organization she and her husband started, the AACS, has mushroomed to about 200 members.
“We have an activity every month, but the winter months are more active, because a good percentage of our members have two homes – North and here,” says Maida. “So we do more activities during the season, the winter months.”
Members of the AACS pay annual dues, which are then used to host dinners, invite speakers on cultural issues and history, and produce a monthly newsletter that Maida writes and sends by postal mail.
“We do not have any political or religious activities,” she says, “because those are two issues with Armenians that create controversy.”
Maida says the best part of being involved in the AACS is the enthusiasm of members for being involved in the organization and getting to socialize with other Armenians.
“You know, Naples is a very generic society,” she says. “Armenians have no notion that they could sit down and have a dinner with another Armenian. The idea that they [actually] can, I think, creates the enthusiasm.”
In the pages of her newsletter, Hye Times, Maida writes about Armenian history, literature, and tidbits she culls from other sources.
“I have a lot of things from the Armenian Reporter,” she says. “When I see something – for example, your story about the Mexican Ambassador in Washington being an Armenian – I write about it.”
In the current issue of Hye Times, Maida wrote about poet Daniel Varoujan and reprinted an essay about Lent written by 13th-century catholicos Levon Yervantsi. The newsletter also keeps members updated about each other.
“Of course, we have a lot of deaths,” she says, “because, you see, our average age is 65-70, and we have quite a few, sad to say, deaths. But, in compensation, new members come in all the time.”
Maida says the AACS doesn’t have ambitions to become bigger or join a bigger institution, because Naples is a small town with limited means.
“We don’t have our own place,” says Maida, “so we are at the mercy of clubs and places like that when we meet. We have to organize the food, the drinks, the music. We’re very limited as far as things that we want to do, but when we do something, they all love it.”
The annual picnic
In addition to the annual celebration of Armenian Christmas on January 6, the AACS hosts an annual picnic, which this year took place on March 8 and drew at least 150 members and non-members.
“Usually we do it on Marco Island,” says Maida. “That’s where Mark Nahabedian comes into the equation. He’s the picnic man. He does it all, and we have another gentleman, Jim Derderian. He’s from Massachusetts, and he brings the kebab, and everybody brings an Armenian dish. I think we go home two pounds more than we came in.”
The picnic tradition in Naples-Marco Island is credited to the late Gus Barber of Barber Foods, which began its chicken and beef business in the 1950s.
“Jim Derderian, who is from Bethune, Massachusetts, and Gus Barber, from Cape Elizabeth, Maine, would have a little picnic at the park, and there would be about 20 people,” remembers Mark Nahabedian.
“One day they decided to invite me, because I knew about half of them. So from then on, that went on for about ten years. Then, when Maida started this organization, a couple of times we had parties at the beach. Then we got involved with Jim and Gus, and that’s how it worked out.”
Gus Barber passed away last summer, but Mark says the Naples community will always remember him as a great guy, and a very benevolent guy.
“I introduced him to a friend from Watertown,” says Mark, “and Gus donated $100,000 to the Armenian Tree Project. Two years ago, we happened to be in Armenia, and I went into the tree project orchard, and I was very impressed.”
Mission parish
Ahead of the start of the Lent season, the local Armenian community celebrated Poon Paregentan, the service that takes place the last Sunday before the start of Lent. Officiating the service was visiting parish priest Fr. Nerses Jebejian.
“Up until this time, we had never had a service on the Sunday before Lent,” says Pamela Torosian of the Naples Parish. “So we’re very happy to have had the service this year. Afterwards we went to a restaurant and actually had an Italian dinner and had a party. We had about 67 people – which during the season is a fair number for us.”
Pamela says an average of 60 people participate in their monthly liturgical services, which are held at different churches throughout the year.
“During the season, we have all the snowbirds come down from the north,” says Pamela, “and we feel strongly that it’s important to try to provide badarak services for them once a month, when they’re so used to having it once a week up north.”
Pamela and her late husband moved to Naples 17 years ago. She says her husband’s main concern with living in Naples was that there was no local Armenian church.
“My husband, along with myself, and another couple, Sylvia and Bob Raubolt, started the mission parish down here in Southwest Florida,” she says. “It takes about an hour and a half to go to the church services on the east coast, and about two and a half hours to go north of here, so we thought it was important to provide that service for the people of Southwest Florida.”
Pamela and other members of the Parish Council hope that in the next few years the local community will be able to buy or build its own Armenian church.
“We have a unique situation down here with the number of retirees that we have,” she says. “A lot of our members have been very active in their church parishes, so we have a lot of experience.”
After her husband passed away, Pamela, who is not Armenian, decided she wanted to play an active role in the Parish Council, as she had done when her husband was alive.
“It was his passion, and I’d always been very active with the Armenian church, because it was a very warm family that was very welcoming when I married my husband up in the Greenfield area, up in Wisconsin,” says Pamela. “When I came down here, I had that same kind of reception. So I was very supportive with his ethnic and religious background. I feel it’s important to carry it on, not only because of him, but also because I have Armenian stepchildren and Armenian grandchildren. You have to lead by example, you know.”
The visiting der hayr
Fr. Jebejian is one of several mission priests who serve communities under the auspices of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church.
“I started coming to Naples once a month around 1999-2000,” says Fr. Nerses, who resides in Pompano Beach, on the east coast of Florida. “I divide my time, mostly weekends, and I go wherever I have to.”
This former director of the Mission Parish Program of the Diocese oversaw 22 mission parishes at one time. Under his direction, Armenian priests celebrated the liturgy across the Eastern U.S. in communities that did not have a permanent parish priest. Since his retirement from that post, he provides spiritual council to communities including Naples, Baton Rouge, Kansas City, and Atlanta.
“Here in Naples, there’s a large community of Armenians,” he says. “In the wintertime, there are about 300 families that come from around the country. In the summertime, we have 200-225 families.”
Fr. Nerses’ hope for the community is that the new five-member Parish Council will secure a permanent location for the church and hold weekly services.
“It’s very easy to go to a Catholic church, a Greek church, an Episcopal church, do a service, and get out,” he says. “But in order for something to survive, it has to have continuity, and for [community members] to have continuity they need a place, a building. They need a residence. They need a house where they can continue their tradition, their religious life, their faith, and their spiritual nourishment and growth, and in order to do that, you need a place.”
The Aleppo-native knows first-hand how a permanent structure can change the life of an Armenian community. He has helped communities in Louisiana, Kansas, and Georgia acquire locations, raise funds, and build churches.
“I had been going to Baton Rouge since 1983, for instance,” he says. “I used to go once a month. In 2002, I told them, ‘I’ve been coming here since 1983, and nothing has been happening.’ It’s a very small community. All they have in Louisiana is something like 40 families. I said that there’s no sense in me coming here, if you people are not going to have something here, a community center, a church. And I said, ‘Do something else.’”
A week after Fr. Nerses’ talk with Louisiana Armenians, he received a call from the chairman of the local parish, who told him the community was ready to take the next step. Fr. Nerses returned to Baton Rouge and helped the local Armenians find a suitable site, a former piano store and storage facility, do the bidding, and buy the building, which soon was consecrated as an Armenian church (Community, March 21, 2009).
“In the Louisiana area, we don’t have families or individuals who have that kind of money,” Fr. Nerses says. “The chairman of the Parish Council gave a large amount of money, and that excited other people in the community. It excited young people, and they gave some money. One gave a thousand. One gave three thousand. One gave a hundred. Two kids came and said, ‘We’ll give you ten dollars,’ and we built a church over there.”
Fr. Nerses pushed a similar initiative in Kansas City, where the community purchased a former Catholic church and is expecting a visit from Primate Khajag Barsamian after the completion of construction projects.
Before being assigned to multiple parishes and the Parish Priest Program, Fr. Nerses worked for the World Council of Churches and represented the Armenian Church at international conferences all around the world.
“I was ordained a deacon in 1964 and went to St. Nersess Armenian Seminary in Evanston,” says Fr. Nerses. “I went to Geneva, Switzerland, and I studied at the Ecumenical Institute. Then I worked at the World Council of Churches, and it was quite an interesting experience.”
At the World Council of Churches, Fr. Nerses was assigned to work on youth affairs, which led to his assignments as a mission priest within the Diocese of the Armenian Church. Now his personal mission is to see that communities like the one in Naples find their own corner of their small cities to build an Armenian church.
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