Category: Orthodoxy in the Americas

Protestant hymns in Orthodox churches

I've been looking through a borrowed copy of Fr. Michael Gelsinger's Orthodox Hymns in English, published by the Antiochian Archdiocese in 1939. This is a significant work, and Gelsinger's hymns are still used to this day. I'll write more about this book in the future, but I found the following...

The Apostle of Organ Music

Last week, I wrote about the introduction of organs into Greek churches in America, but I didn't really know why they were introduced. Thanks to David Mastroberte, we now have a plausible explanation: someone specifically set out to popularize organ music. That man was George Anastassiou. Courtesy of Mr. Mastroberte,...

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...

Language in American Orthodoxy, 1916 (reposted from 8/21/09)

To our New Calendar readers: Christ is born! The following article was originally published on August 21, 2009. If you're interested, you might check out the comments to that original posting. We'll be back with brand-new material on Monday, December 28. As you might expect, most American Orthodox parishes in...

St. Raphael’s Consecration (reposted from 7/10/09)

  In recent weeks, traffic to our website has increased exponentially. I'm continually amazed by the numbers of people interested in American Orthodox history. Normally, we publish new material here virtually every weekday. However, today and tomorrow are busy days -- Christmas Eve and Christmas Day -- for those of us...

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...

Greeks in Florida, 1768

Recently, multiple people have asked me to write about the Greek colony in New Smyrna, Florida in the 1760s. Today, I'm doing just that, but I have to admit, I've been rather hesitant. Unlike many of the subjects I tackle here at OrthodoxHistory.org, the New Smyrna story is pretty well-known,...

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,...

Early priests in New Orleans

Holy Trinity Church in New Orleans was the first organized Orthodox parish in the contiguous United States. Despite that fact, precious little is known about its early history. The first priest to visit New Orleans was the infamous Fr. Agapius Honcharenko, but, contrary to popular belief, Honcharenko was not actually...