This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe was established on 31 October 1861, originally under the name Europena Zarthost Dharmanu Khatu, at a meeting of fifteen people held at the London residence of Muncherjee Hormusji Cama, together with Dadabhai Naoroji. Its founding purposes were practical rather than ceremonial: to purchase land for the burial of the dead, to help stranded or destitute Zoroastrians, and to produce books on Zoroastrianism.
Those purposes reflected the community's actual size at the time. England's Zoroastrian population numbered roughly fifty people when the Trust was founded, mostly students, a population small enough that a single meeting of fifteen founders represented a meaningful fraction of the whole community rather than a token gathering. The Trust was historically governed by a body of managing trustees that included student representatives at Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, tying its governance directly to the student population its founding purposes were built around.
The Trust incorporated as a UK charity in 1978, more than a century after its 1861 founding, formalizing a structure that had already been operating under trustee governance for generations.