With 30,000 rupees from Argyres’s estate and further contributions from the Greek and British merchants of Kolkata, the church, dedicated to The Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor, was completed in 1780. Eight years earlier, the first Greek Priest, Reverend Nikiforos from Sinai, had already arrived in India and occasionally performed the Greek liturgy in Greek homes. With the completion of the church, he began officiating there and maintaining the birth, death, marriage and other records of the Greek community.

Among the priests who served at the church was a certain Father Constantinos Parthenios of Corfu. He would later serve as the model for Christ in Johann Zoffany’s famous painting of the Last Supper, that is still seen hanging on the walls of St John’s Church of England in Kolkata.

Greek families in Bengal, many of whom had been here for two centuries, had not forgotten their homeland. Ever since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Greece had been under Ottoman rule. In the early 19th century, as Greece prepared to revolt, prosperous Greek merchants from Kolkata funded the underground Greek resistance movement – Filiki Eteria or the Society of Friends – which played an important role in the Greek War of Independence. In 1802, on the second day of Easter, they gathered in the Greek Church and, according to the church records, made a solemn vow to use all their spare money and riches for the resurrection of Greece.