About this stamp
Two Hundred Years of the Old Seminary
India Post issued this ₹5 stamp on 21 April 2015 for the bicentenary of the Orthodox Theological Seminary at Kottayam, known as the Old Seminary or the Cottayam Syrian College, whose foundation was laid in February 1813. It is run by the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of the St Thomas Christians. Its two-hundred-year-old quadrangular building, where English education began in Kerala, is a protected heritage monument, and the seminary is the oldest non-Roman Catholic seminary for Christian priests in India.
The Nalukettu
Besides its chapel, the building holds a nalukettu, a four-sided wooden courtyard in the style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which now houses a museum of two thousand years of Christianity in India. Since 1965 the seminary has been a theological college affiliated to the Senate of Serampore. Its campus also houses a joint research faculty of the Orthodox, Mar Thoma and CSI seminaries of Kerala, the Sruti School of Syriac music and the Mar Gregorios Foundation.
The stamp was designed by Alka Sharma; Security Printing Press, Hyderabad printed 0.6 million, 0.1 million of them for the proponent.
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