Arathoon Stephen
Indian hotelier and real estate developer
Arathoon Stephen (Armenian: Արաթուն Սթիվեն; 1861 – 14 May 1927) was an Armenian hotelier and real estate developer based in British India. Amongst other properties, he owned and developed the Kolkata institutions: the Empire Theatre and the Grand Hotel.
Born in Isfahan, Iran in 1861, Stephen arrived in Calcutta sometime in the nineteenth century where he first began selling jewelry from a wheelbarrow. Later, he opened a jewelry and antique shop at 18 Chowringhee Road and the Theatre Royale at No. 16. In 1911, he bought out a run-down boarding house run by Mrs. Annie Monk and built the Grand Hotel. Stephen also owned several other properties in Calcutta, many of which now have heritage status, including Queens Mansion (which houses the Armenian Club of Calcutta), Stephen Court, Stephen House and the Empire Theatre. He also built and owned the Everest Hotel in Darjeeling. Stephen died on 14 May 1927.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Arathoon Stephen” as indian hotelier and real estate developer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16030530. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1861, 1927 and 1911.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arathoon Stephen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.