Tag: Chicago

What is a parish?

In my recent lecture on Orthodoxy in Chicago, given at Holy Apostles Greek Orthodox Church in Westchester, Illinois, I cautiously addressed the still-controversial issue of the 1897 split in Chicago's Greek Orthodox community. Let me go over the basic details very briefly, before moving onto the broader question of what...

Chicago-area lecture on March 23

I've mentioned this before, but I wanted to let readers know that I'll be speaking in the Chicago area on Wednesday, March 23. My lecture, which will focus on the early history of Orthodoxy in Chicago (roughly the mid-1880s through the mid-1890s), will take place at Holy Apostles Greek Orthodox...

Vintage color postcard of Chicago’s Holy Trinity Cathedral

Yesterday, we published a series of photos of Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Chicago. These images, taken in 1905, are part of the Library of Congress' online collection of photos from the Chicago Daily News. Over on our Facebook page, a reader named Katja Yurschak posted a link to a wonderful...

1905 photos from Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago

The Library of Congress website has all sorts of great resources, including a collection of old photos from the Chicago Daily News. The following five photos are of the newly-built Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Chicago. -- Matthew Namee

More on Fr. Basil Bouroff of Chicago

Over a year ago, I wrote about Fr. Basil Bouroff, one of the first priests of the Russian church in Chicago (now Holy Trinity OCA Cathedral). While serving as a priest, Bouroff began attending the new University of Chicago. His religious and/or political views put him in hot water with...

St. John comes to Chicago, 1895

This article was originally published one year ago, on November 2, 2009.   This past weekend, those of us on the New Calendar celebrated the feast day of St. John Kochurov, the Russian New Martyr and former priest of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago. With that in mind, I thought I'd...

The American tour of a Greek archbishop in 1893

As we've discussed several times in the past, in 1893, a Greek archbishop visited the United States. His name was Archbishop Dionysius Latas of Zante, and he came to America to attend the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. That's where we last saw him; today, we'll pick up Abp...

From Repki to the New World: A Belarusian Priest in America

Editor's note: For quite a while now, I have been corresponding with Ales Simakou of Gomel, Belarus. Ales describes himself as "a researcher of Belarusian-American (especially Indian) contacts," and he has been researching the life of Fr. Nikolai Grinkevich, a Belarusian priest who was ordained in San Francisco and served in...

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 World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893

Not long ago, I wrote a pair of articles on the visit of the Greek archbishop Dionysius Latas to the United States. The archbishop came to America in 1893 to attend the "World's Parliament of Religions," which was held in conjunction with the Chicago World's Fair. When we last left Abp Dionysius, he...