Tag: New Orleans

The Greeks in America, 1873

Editor's note: The following article appeared in the New York Times on August 4, 1873. That's nearly two decades before Greek immigrants began to flood into America. According to the book Race, Ethnicity, and Place in a Changing America, only 217 immigrants came from Greece to the US in the...

The census record of Fr. Misael Karydis

Fr. Misael Karydis is one of many odd, mysterious figures from early American Orthodox history. We've discussed him at length in past articles. He was the longtime pastor of Holy Trinity Church in New Orleans, from 1881 until his suicide in 1901, and besides his pastoral work, he was apparently...

Agapius Honcharenko: answers to some questions

Recently, Nicholas Chapman published several newly-discovered documents relating to Agapius Honcharenko here at OH.org. A reader named Reg responded with this comment: This is getting confusing. Matthew since you wrote the original story on Honcharenko, could I ask you to post a timeline on Honcharenko: Date & place of birth...

Agapius Honcharenko in defense of himself

Editor's note: Today, we present the second of three historical documents recently discovered by Nicholas Chapman. On August 24, we published Nicholas' introduction to the documents, and last week, we published a letter by St. Philaret of Moscow on the subject of Orthodoxy in America in 1865. Today's document is...

A visit to the New Orleans Greek church in 1885

Editor's note: The following excerpt appeared in the Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans and Environs, published by Will H. Coleman in 1885. It is a rare firsthand account of Holy Trinity church in New Orleans in the 19th century. The priest at the time was Fr. Misael...

The Historical Reality of Greek Orthodoxy in America

Last week, I was privileged to speak at the Greek Archdiocese Clergy-Laity Congress in Atlanta. I gave the same talk on two days, July 5 and 6. Below, we've published the text of my lecture. A couple of things, up front: first, I didn't include footnotes, because this was just...

The death of Fr. Misael Karydis

On December 22, I wrote about the tragic death of Fr. Misael Karydis, longtime pastor of the Greek church in New Orleans. You'll want to read that article first, to follow what I'm talking about today. After I published that piece, I unconvered several more reports on Karydis' death, from...

Organs in Greek Orthodox churches

As regular readers of this website know, I am particularly interested in the "Americanization" of Orthodoxy in the New World -- things like clergy appearance (beards vs. shaved faces, cassocks vs. collars), pews, church music (organs and mixed choirs), early converts, the use of English, and so forth. Today, I'm...

Fr. Misael Karydis and his flying machine

Archimandrite Misael Karydis spent twenty years as the priest in New Orleans, from 1881 until 1901. Two decades at a single parish is a long time, especially in the early years of American Orthodox history. Before Karydis, only one priest (that I know of) had ever served such a lengthy...

The First Orthodox Liturgy in Chicago

Fr. Misael Karydis served at Holy Trinity Greek Church in New Orleans from 1881 to 1901. Throughout the 1880s, he was the only Orthodox priest in between the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, and even in the 1890s, he was basically the only Orthodox priest in the American South. As such,...