On a quiet stretch of White Oak Avenue, a few blocks south of the boulevard, children file out of a school where the morning announcements are read in two languages and the alphabet on the wall has thirty-eight letters. The Armenians in Encino are not the largest Armenian community in Los Angeles, nor the loudest. They are something rarer: a community that arrived with means, or built them quickly, and chose one of the San Fernando Valley’s most expensive postcodes to raise the next generation. This is the story of how a town named for its oak trees became home to Armenian doctors, lawyers and shopkeepers, and to the first Armenian day school in America.
The Place
Encino sits in the central-southern San Fernando Valley, bounded by Sherman Oaks to the east, Tarzana to the west and the Santa Monica Mountains to the south. Its name comes from the Spanish for holm oak, by way of the Tongva village of Siutcanga, the place of the oaks, that stood here long before the Portola expedition passed through in 1769.
The land became Rancho Los Encinos in 1845, and the de la Ossa Adobe from that ranch still stands in Los Encinos State Historic Park, beside a spring-fed lake. The postwar boom filled the surrounding hills with ranch houses and, later, gated estates.
Today Encino is one of the Valley’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. In the 91436 postcode, median household income passed $170,000 in 2023, and the streets south of Ventura Boulevard hold the long gated driveways and tennis courts that earned the area its nickname, the Beverly Hills of the Valley.
How It Became Armenian
The Armenian story in Encino is really two stories braided together: a story of churches and schools that planted roots early, and a story of successive waves of refugees and immigrants who, having made it, moved up and over the hill into the Valley’s better addresses.
The early Valley parish
Through the first half of the twentieth century, the Armenians of Los Angeles were concentrated downtown and in Hollywood. The San Fernando Valley held only a scattering. In the 1960s, by the parish’s own account, the Armenian population of greater Los Angeles was close to 35,000, with roughly 4,000 living in the Valley.
That was enough to build a church. In October 1960 a congregation purchased a parcel of land in Encino, helped by an $80,000 donation from Satenig Arakelian. Ground was broken on Holy Martyrs Armenian Apostolic Church on 5 March 1961, and the building was consecrated on 13 October 1963. For the Valley’s Armenians, it was the first permanent home of their own.
A school that changed the diaspora
What happened next mattered far beyond Encino. The textile merchant Mateos Ferrahian had died in 1955, leaving his estate toward the creation of an Armenian secondary school. On 17 July 1964 the Holy Martyrs church board resolved to open a day school on its grounds, and on 14 September 1964 it opened with twelve students under a young principal named Gabriel Injejikian.
It was the first Armenian day school in the United States. After a $235,000 gift from Ferrahian’s executor, the school took his name: Holy Martyrs Ferrahian High School. Enrolment grew from twelve to forty-three within a year, to two hundred by the late 1970s.
The refugees arrive
The Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975, sent tens of thousands of Lebanese Armenians out of Beirut. Many came to Los Angeles. Around the same time, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 pushed out a generation of Iranian Armenians, merchants and professionals who left Tehran and Isfahan with what they could carry.
These were not, for the most part, penniless arrivals. The Lebanese and Iranian Armenian communities had been urban, mercantile and educated. When they reached Los Angeles, many were drawn first to Hollywood and to the Armenian community in Glendale, but those who prospered looked to the Valley, and to Encino in particular, for the space and the schools.
The Soviet wave
The last great wave came from Soviet Armenia. Beginning in August 1987, under glasnost, the Soviet Union began granting exit visas to Armenians seeking to reunite with relatives abroad. From October 1987 through March 1988 alone, some 2,000 Armenians arrived in Los Angeles County, and through the late 1980s the overwhelming majority of Armenians leaving the USSR settled in the Los Angeles area.
That wave built Little Armenia in Hollywood and swelled Glendale into the largest Armenian city outside the homeland, while neighbouring towns absorbed the overflow into communities like the Armenians of Burbank and the foothill enclave of the Armenians of La Crescenta. Encino received the part of every wave that did well: the children who became orthodontists, the families who traded an apartment in Hollywood for a house south of the boulevard.
The Landmarks
Holy Martyrs Armenian Apostolic Church, 5300 White Oak Avenue. Consecrated in 1963, this is the spiritual anchor of Armenian Encino and one of the oldest Armenian parishes in the San Fernando Valley. Its grounds hold the church, its schools and the community life that orbits both.
Holy Martyrs Ferrahian High School, 5300 White Oak Avenue. The first Armenian day school in the United States, opened in 1964 with twelve pupils. It has grown into the largest pre-university Armenian school in the diaspora, with well over a thousand students, and earned full Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation in 1995.
Holy Martyrs Marie Cabayan Elementary School, 5300 White Oak Avenue. The elementary arm of the Holy Martyrs campus, where the Armenian alphabet, history and language are taught alongside the standard California curriculum. For many Encino families it is the reason they chose the postcode.
ANCA San Fernando Valley West, 17238 Ventura Boulevard. The local chapter of the Armenian National Committee of America keeps an office on the boulevard, organising around political advocacy, genocide commemoration and Valley civic life. Its presence marks Encino as a node in the wider Armenian political map of Los Angeles.
Aroma Bakery Cafe, 18047 Ventura Boulevard. A Ventura Boulevard cafe and bakery whose Mediterranean and Middle Eastern menu draws the diaspora’s overlapping crowds, Armenian, Persian and Israeli alike. It is the kind of place where a long lunch turns into an afternoon of coffee and argument.
Los Encinos State Historic Park, 16756 Moorpark Street. Not an Armenian site, but the spiritual centre of the whole neighbourhood: the spring, the lake and the 1849 adobe around which the town grew. Armenian families picnic here on weekends the way they once did in the orchards outside Yerevan.
St. Peter Armenian Apostolic Church, 17231 Sherman Way, Van Nuys. A short drive north, serving the Valley’s Armenians since 1958, St. Peter is the older sister parish to Holy Martyrs and a reminder that Armenian Encino has always been part of a larger Valley fabric.
Where They Came From
The Armenians of Encino did not come from one place. They came from the long unwinding of the Armenian diaspora itself, the communities scattered across the Middle East after the genocide of 1915 and then scattered again by the upheavals of the late twentieth century.
Many trace their families through Beirut and Aleppo, Lebanese and Syrian Armenians whose grandparents had been resettled in the cities of the Levant. Others came by way of Tehran and Isfahan, the Iranian Armenian community whose roots in Persia run back four centuries. A third strand came directly from Soviet Armenia, from Yerevan and Gyumri, in the visa waves of the late 1980s and 1990s.
What united them in Encino was less a common origin than a common arc: urban, educated families who, after one or two displacements, had the resources to choose where in Los Angeles they would finally settle. The same arc carried other Armenians to the workshops and bakeries of the Armenian community in Montebello east of downtown. They chose schools and quiet streets, and they chose to stay close enough to Glendale and Hollywood to remain part of the larger community without living inside it.
Encino Today
Armenian Encino is not a district you can map with a hard boundary. There is no Armenian quarter here, no commercial strip given over entirely to the language. The community is woven into an affluent, mixed neighbourhood where the largest foreign-born group is actually Iranian, and where Persian Encino and Armenian Encino sit side by side, sharing bakeries and orthodontists and the same view of the mountains.
What holds Armenian Encino together is institutional rather than residential. The Holy Martyrs campus on White Oak Avenue pulls families from across the southern Valley, and many who send their children there live in Tarzana, Woodland Hills or Sherman Oaks as much as in Encino itself. The church and the school are the gravity; the houses are scattered.
It is a community defined by aspiration achieved. The hardship is a generation or two back now, in the war stories of grandparents. What remains is the quieter project of holding on to a language and a faith inside one of the most comfortable corners of Los Angeles, and the daily proof, in two-language morning announcements, that it can be done.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Armenians live in Encino?
There is no precise count of Armenians in Encino specifically, because the census does not break the neighbourhood out by ancestry at that level. The community is a significant but minority presence within an affluent, mixed neighbourhood whose largest immigrant group is Iranian. The institutional heart of Armenian Encino is the Holy Martyrs campus on White Oak Avenue.
What is the main Armenian church in Encino?
Holy Martyrs Armenian Apostolic Church at 5300 White Oak Avenue, consecrated in 1963, is the principal Armenian church in Encino and one of the oldest Armenian parishes in the San Fernando Valley. It anchors a campus that also includes Ferrahian High School and Cabayan Elementary.
Why is Ferrahian school important to Armenians?
Holy Martyrs Ferrahian High School, opened in Encino in 1964, was the first Armenian day school in the United States. It began with twelve students and has grown into the largest pre-university Armenian school in the diaspora, making it a landmark institution for Armenians far beyond Encino.
How is Armenian Encino different from Glendale?
Glendale is the heart of the Los Angeles Armenian community, with by far the largest population and the densest commercial and political life. Encino is smaller, wealthier and more residential, home to families who often arrived with means or prospered after arriving. The Armenians in Encino tend to remain connected to Glendale and Hollywood while living in a quieter, more affluent setting.
Where did the Armenians in Encino come from?
Most trace their families to the Armenian diaspora communities of the Middle East, particularly Lebanon and Iran, and to Soviet Armenia. The Lebanese Civil War from 1975, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Soviet exit-visa waves of the late 1980s each brought Armenians to Los Angeles, and the most established of those families gravitated to the Valley.
Is Encino more Persian or Armenian?
Both communities have a strong presence, and they overlap considerably. Encino’s largest foreign-born group is Iranian, and the neighbourhood is well known for its Persian community, but it also holds a substantial Armenian community centred on the Holy Martyrs institutions. Many Iranian Armenians belong to both worlds at once.
If your family’s story passed through Encino, or any of the places Armenians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Beirut, Tehran or Yerevan, to a school on White Oak Avenue, to wherever you are now.