Category: Global Orthodoxy

A Connecticut Yankee in the Tsarina’s Domain

It may come as a surprise to learn that one of the earliest descriptions of Orthodox worship in Alaska comes not from the pen of a Russian missionary or fur trader, but from that of a young Anglo-American explorer who visited the “Great Land” in 1778, sixteen years before the...

An interview with Patriarch Tikhon in 1923

  Editor's note: The interview that follows originally appeared in a book published by the YMCA in Prague. I found it on the fascinating Alexander Palace Time Machine website (the original is here). Many thanks to Jenny Mosher, who posted a link to this interview on our SOCHA Facebook page....

Icons Are Not “Written”

Editor's note: Today, we are pleased to present an article by Dr. John Yiannias, Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Virginia. Dr. Yiannias holds a Ph.D. in Early Christian and Byzantine Art from the University of Pittsburgh, and is a leading expert on Orthodox iconography. At the 2008 conference...

Chambésy proposes Episcopal Assemblies in the 1990s

Fresh from the historic first Episcopal Assembly of North and Central America, it is helpful to remember that the proposal for the regional Assemblies which came out of the Chambésy, Switzerland meetings of the mother churches did not originate only recently. Many have seen this week's meeting as in some...

The death of Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople, 1821

Today is both the Feast of the Annunciation (on the New Calendar), and Greek Independence Day. With that in mind, I decided to look in my archives for American accounts of the Greek War of Independence, in 1821. I have quite a few reports from various newspapers and journals, and...

Reconstructing the life of St. Andrew

This has nothing to do with American Orthodox history, but given what I know of our readership here, I think many of you will greatly enjoy this article. It's an interview with Greek author George Alexandrou, published in the journal Road to Emmaus. Alexandrou wrote a thousand-page book on St....

“Thank you; we have the original.”

Most of the time, on this website, we talk about the history of Orthodoxy in the Americas. But it's important to remember that, especially in the 19th century, American Protestant missionaries were traveling in the other direction, going to places like Greece and Syria in an effort to convert Orthodox...

Isabel Hapgood on St. John of Kronstadt

A couple of weeks ago, we reprinted St. Alexander Hotovitzky's 1904 account of his meeting with St. John of Kronstadt. Nearly a decade earlier, the famous translator Isabel Hapgood wrote her own profile of St. John -- then known as Fr. John Sergieff, pastor of St. Andrew's Church in Kronstadt. The...

St. Alexander Hotovitzky on St. John of Kronstadt

  St. Alexander Hotovitzky was the rector of St. Nicholas Church (and then Cathedral) in New York City from his ordination in 1896 until his return to Russia in 1914. For almost all of that time, he was the highest-ranking priest in the Russian Mission. Of course, he was dean...