The Greek Orthodox Church in America

A Modern History

Alexander Kitroeff

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501749445
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In this sweeping history, Alexander Kitroeff shows how the Greek Orthodox Church in America has functioned as much more than a religious institution, becoming the focal point in the lives of the country's million-plus Greek immigrants and their descendants.

Assuming the responsibility of running Greek-language schools and encouraging local parishes to engage in cultural and social activities, the church became the most important Greek American institution and shaped the identity of Greeks in the United States. Kitroeff digs into these traditional activities, highlighting the American church's dependency on the "mother church, " the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the use of Greek language in the Sunday liturgy. Today, as this rich biography of the church shows us, Greek Orthodoxy remains in between the Old World and the New, both Greek and American.

Chapter 1

Greek Orthodoxy Arrives in America

Mass emigration from Greece to the United States began in the late nineteenth century. About four hundred thousand Greeks had gone through Ellis Island by the 1920s when the US Congress restricted immigration from southeastern Europe. The passenger lists of the ships they traveled on recorded the very few belongings they brought with them. Their pockets contained a few dollars and scraps of paper with the address of a relative or a fellow villager who had already settled somewhere in the United States, and the directions of how to get there. Other items, of less interest to the authorities, included photographs of loved ones and a few personal effects. The newcomers, it turned out, were also bringing something else to America: the Greek Orthodox religion. Before the Greeks began to arrive in great numbers in the United States, a few wealthy merchants who were engaged in the cotton trade had established the first Greek Orthodox church in New Orleans in 1864; it served business persons and sailors intermittently in the following decades, until the era of mass immigration gave it a new life. There was another early Greek settlement in Florida in the nineteenth century, but no evidence exists of any organized religious practices. The same is true of the small numbers of Greeks who began arriving from the 1860s onward. It was the mass migration of the 1890s that brought a growing number of Greek Orthodox churches throughout the country. By the end of World War I, after two decades of upheavals, Greek Orthodoxy in America would acquire a centralized administrative structure and governing body: the archdiocese.

At first, where there were only few Greeks, they worshipped in other already established Eastern Orthodox churches, primarily Russian ones. But they saw that only as a temporary measure and looked forward to establishing their own, Greek church. In the Old World the immigrants had left, Eastern Orthodoxy remained resolutely divided into separate national churches, even though Orthodox ecclesiology did not accept the concept of a national church. National churches functioned de facto if not de jure, and their existence was the norm; indeed, “the transition from a non-national to a national pattern of existence [was] a key characteristic of the Orthodox world in Eastern and South Eastern Europe, starting from the 19th century.”¹ The immigrants from the Orthodox lands of Europe and the Middle East carried those divisions with them across the Atlantic and reproduced them in America. Russian émigré theologian John Meyendorff noted that those separate Orthodox jurisdictions born of the importation of nationalism from Europe created the appearance that they belonged to different denominations.²

The national character of the church was so important to the Greek immigrants that they ignored the Russian church’s canonically important claim to represent all the Orthodox in the New World because Russia established the first mission there—albeit in Alaska, before it was acquired by the United States in 1867. The Russian church had spread its influence eastward by the turn of the century in an effort to incorporate all Eastern Orthodox who began arriving in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Toward that purpose, the Russian Orthodox North American Diocese moved its headquarters first to San Francisco and then to New York. But the Russian church was only able to attract Eastern Orthodox who did not yet have their own ethnic church and mostly those from Eastern Europe whose churches also used a Slavonic language liturgy, which was closer to the Russian. Greeks worshipped in Russian, Slavic, or Syrian Orthodox churches only if there was no Greek church. For example, the first Greek immigrants in Chicago worshipped in rented facilities in cooperation with Slavic Orthodox immigrants beginning in 1885, and the first Greek immigrants who arrived in San Francisco worshipped at a Russian church, as did the first Greeks in Galveston, Texas, and Seattle, Washington.³

The growing number of Greek immigrants all over the United States created a Greek Orthodox entity big enough to choose to be separate from the Russians. By 1915 the geographical spread of Greek Orthodox across North America was impressive, and churches were appearing throughout the country all the way to the West Coast. The total number of such churches is difficult to establish with any certainty, but one reliable source estimates there were 105 Greek Orthodox churches in existence by 1915. The first two of this new wave were the Annunciation in Chicago in 1892 and Holy Trinity in New York in 1894, the two cities with the greatest number of Greek immigrants. When Holy Trinity was founded in New York, a Russian cleric arrived claiming authority over it, because the Russian church had registered as the “Greek” church with the State of New York. The parishioners, headed by Solon Vlastos, the editor of the daily Greek language newspaper Atlantis, quickly took steps to incorporate Holy Trinity in the State of New York as the “Hellenic Eastern Orthodox Church of New York.” The article of incorporation was at pains to show the difference between the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches, stating that one of the purposes of becoming incorporated was “to distinguish the said ‘Hellenic Eastern Orthodox Church of New York’ from the so-called ‘Greek Church of the Eastern Confession’ by which title the Church of Russia and the Church of Greece have been known, although the Greek church has been separated from the Russian since the year eleven hundred anno domini.”⁴ In contrast to the Greek Orthodox attitude toward the Russian Orthodox in the United States, the Arab Orthodox, also known as Syrian Orthodox, sought and received the support of the Russian church. Their close relationship was not only because of their relatively small numbers but also because the Syrian church in the Old World, the Patriarchate of Antioch, maintained close relations with the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow.⁵

When Holy Trinity could not satisfy the needs of the growing numbers of Greeks in Manhattan, two more churches appeared on the West Side: Annunciation and St. Eleftherios. Across the Brooklyn Bridge, the Greeks established St. Constantine’s, which later became St. Constantine and St. Helen’s Church. Those who went upstate to look for jobs in manufacturing established another four churches, bringing the total in New York State to seven. Many Greeks were settling in New England to work mainly in the textile towns, and the first Greek Orthodox churches appeared in Boston, Ipswich, Lowell, Lynn, and Springfield in Massachusetts and in Providence, Rhode Island, and by 1915 there were thirty-eight churches in New England, nineteen of them in Massachusetts. In Pennsylvania, Greeks took up jobs in manufacturing and in the mining towns in the western part of the state; all together, there were sixteen Greek Orthodox churches throughout the state, the first being the Annunciation in Philadelphia. The total in the mid-Atlantic states was nine, including one that was apparently being set up in North Carolina. In the midwestern states there were twenty-six churches; Chicago, with three churches, was the city with the most, while Ohio, with eight, had the most of all states, because the Greeks had spread out to all the small manufacturing towns. The rest of the country—the South, the mountain West, and the West Coast—was the destination of smaller numbers of Greeks, though more would follow in the decades following World War I. But even then, there were Greeks all the way from Jacksonville in Florida and Savannah in Georgia to Galveston and Oklahoma City, and the total number of Greek Orthodox churches in the South numbered fifteen. There were fewer Greeks in Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, where they went to work in the mines, and in Idaho, were they also found jobs in the livestock industry; nevertheless, in the mountain West they had already established five churches. Finally, the first Greeks had reached the West Coast, and Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, and Seattle each had a Greek Orthodox church. A sign of the growing significance of Greek Orthodoxy was that where there were no Russian churches; the Greek ones attracted all other Eastern Orthodox. In 1901 the Chicago Tribune reported that “Greeks from stores and fruit stands, Russians from the sweat shops and factories, swarthy Syrians and even Arabians crowded the Greek Orthodox Church of Holy Trinity, 34 Johnson Street, to observe the Easter services of their church.”⁶

Byzantine Architecture and Social Space

The earliest Greek Orthodox churches in most cases were usually housed in what had been a Protestant church, whose own congregants had already moved away to a better part of town. But sooner or later the Greeks built their own churches. The very first Greek Orthodox church in the United States, in New Orleans, was a small wooden structure of a type common in Louisiana at the time. In the era of mass immigration, buildings that formerly served as Protestant churches housed the first Greek Orthodox churches in Chicago and New York and most other places. In what was the first of many concessions to the realities of the American environment, the Greek Orthodox—at least the early immigrants—had to forgo the luxury of building a church that would conform to the all-important dictates of tradition, at least externally. Tradition called for churches in the form of basilicas, buildings with a long central nave with an antechamber (narthex) and a semicircular apse at the other end, high windows to admit light, and a dome (cupola) on the roof. The cruciform nave is separated from the sanctuary by a wooden screen adorned with icons. This was the original architectural model for early Christian churches. In Western Europe, churches eventually adopted more varied architectural designs following the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, but Eastern Orthodoxy remained resolutely attached to the basilica archetype throughout history. The internal layout of the church shaped the way the liturgy was conducted, and its continuity helped keep liturgical practice and experience constant through time and consistent whatever the geographical location. The icons decorating the interior adopted a particular pattern: the dome, with its connotations of heaven, was reserved for the holiest figure, Christ, usually called Pantokrator, or Ruler of All; the apse, the second-most-important space, was reserved for the Virgin Mary; while the apostles and angels adorned the drum of the dome just below Christ. The churches the Greeks built in the New World, or those they refurbished, aimed at adhering to this traditional architecture, which functioned as “a codified container of ritual, iconography, and symbolic meaning.”⁷ It was the single most nationally distinctive structure that signaled the arrival and presence of the Greeks in America.

The Old World Byzantine-style structure was so important that, wherever possible, new church buildings would adopt the Byzantine form. Holy Trinity Church in Lowell, Massachusetts—a city that boasted the largest concentration of Greeks in New England, numbering nine thousand during World War I—was the first Greek Orthodox church in the United States to be built according to the requirements of Byzantine architecture, with a cruciform nave and a domed roof—the dome distinguished all Byzantine-style churches from the Russian churches, which had an onion-shaped dome. Holy Trinity was built in Lowell’s Acre neighborhood, where the Greeks were replacing the older Irish immigrants, and the wish to match the grandeur of other churches in the neighborhood motivated the idea of building a Byzantine-style church. Lowell architect Henry L. Rourke designed the church based on Aghia (Hagia) Sophia, the sixth-century church in Istanbul that served as the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople’s cathedral in the Byzantine era. The total construction cost of Holy Trinity came to $80,000. Thomas Burgess, author of one of the early studies on the Greeks in the United States, called it one of the finest churches in America, and he saw it as an Eastern equivalent of the nearby St. Patrick’s: “Directly across the canal stands a beautiful Roman Catholic Church. Here truly meet East and West, two excellent examples of the Byzantine and Gothic fronting each other, the gilded domes and splendid spires rising out of the midst of tumble-down tenements.”⁸ The interior also elicited his praise: “Nothing in Eikons or paintings is gaudy but all is done with exquisite taste and proportion. Truly this house of God, so full of ordered symbolism and pictured teaching cannot but instill in the Greek reverent thoughts of God and his power and love, and devotion to his Holy Church.”⁹ Another early architectural bow to tradition came in Chicago when the first church there, the Annunciation, which had started out in a rented hall and later moved to a Masonic temple, got its own home in 1909. The parish purchased the lot on North LaSalle Street in the city’s downtown at a cost of $18,000, and a church modeled on the Orthodox cathedral in Athens—a combination of Byzantine and Gothic styles—was completed in 1910 at an estimated cost of $100,000.

Byzantine-style churches, or variations thereof, followed in the wake of the westward travels of the Greeks. A visitor to Pocatello, Idaho, in 1915 would probably have been very surprised to see a Greek Orthodox church dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary built in a Byzantine Revival style with a gable roof and redbrick exterior with stone accents, topped by a cylindrical roof-tower with a conical roof and twelve small round-arched windows that provided additional illumination for the nave. Gradually, all churches built from scratch adopted the Byzantine style; it would be only in the 1950s when modern designs appeared.

The form that the liturgy and all forms of worship took within the churches and during outdoor processions on important feast days, especially Easter, adhered strictly to tradition and evoked the homeland in the minds of the immigrants. The entire service and the chanting were in Greek, while incense and candles burned in the churches. Grace Abbot, an American social worker who was involved in helping the settlement of Greek immigrants in Chicago, marveled at the Old World character of an Orthodox procession and wrote, “If an American were to visit this neighborhood on the night of Good Friday when the stores are draped with purple and black and watch at mid-night the solemn procession of Greek men march down the street carrying their burning candles and chanting hymns, he would probably feel as though he were no longer in America.” She added that “those who marched were homesick and mourning because try as they might they could not quite recreate the atmosphere of Easter in the Peloponnesean home town.”¹⁰ Yet church life did go a long way toward reminding the immigrants, if only during the important feast days, of the homes they had left behind to cross the Atlantic. Most of these immigrants were men, either single or having left wife and family back in the homeland, so there was no great demand for the holy sacraments associated with weddings or baptisms. It was only after wives and children began coming over after World War I that this demand increased beyond attendance at big feast days of Orthodoxy, because “the immigrants were neither ardent joiners nor attenders of churches… . They attended whenever they felt the need, especially during Holy Week, Easter, Christmas, Epiphany and the Feast of the Annunciation. The church parishes in New York and the United States were much larger than the enrolled membership… . It was not uncommon for a parish with 50 enrolled members to minister to the needs of a community that may have numbered several thousand.”¹¹

But the Greek churches did much more than cater to spiritual needs: to their constituents they functioned as social spaces that brought the Greeks together. The ubiquitous Greek coffee shop that spread throughout the country even faster than Greek Orthodox churches also served that function, but it was a male preserve. In contrast, the parish was much more inclusive, as well as being more formal and representative of the entire Greek settlement. We should bear in mind that the immigrants imported to the New World “highly variable folk practices consisting of multilayered secular and religious elements … story telling songs and dances, ritual laments, hospitality, traditions and beliefs associated with Orthodoxy, superstitions, folk healing, oral poetic traditions and divination”¹²—in other words, a rich culture in which tradition determined a moral order and in which Orthodoxy and the church as a meeting place arguably played a central role. And the local parish in the United States resembled the one in the homeland where Orthodoxy took on a particular meaning in each rural locality, fusing with local traditions and thus defining the identity of a neighborhood or a village.

The church became the site of the major religious rites such as baptism, weddings, and funerals, which for many Orthodox, especially in rural Greece, went beyond religious belief and were linked with a metaphysical belief in fate.¹³ The particular deity or the saint the church was dedicated to also had a particular significance in fostering local, village identity. The Panagía or Virgin Mary in particular is coextensive with Greek identity writ large, because the national independence day is celebrated on the day the Orthodox Church celebrates her Annunciation; churches dedicated to Mary are distinguished through calling them “Panagía of—” and adding the village’s name.¹⁴ Parish leaders would make deliberate efforts to foster community-based activities that evoked the social character of Orthodoxy and especially its philanthropic traditions. Parish-based charity was the sphere in which women, who played a secondary role in all the other affairs of the church, were able to take the initiative and make their mark. One of the earliest examples was in 1902 when women organized a charity group that was associated with Holy Trinity in New York. Among their activities was offering aid and advice to the immigrants arriving in the city, as well as offering help to those who got into trouble with the law. Such women’s charity groups, named Philoptochos (“friend of the poor”), began appearing in most parishes and became important sources of help not only to the poor but also to those unfortunate Greeks who fell victim to the xenophobia that began increasing in America in the early twentieth century. There was therefore all the more reason for the embrace of the church by new...