Category: Firsts
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Fr. Jacob Korchinsky: Missionary and Martyr
Recently, on our Facebook page, someone left a comment requesting information on Fr. Jacob Korchinsky, who is apparently being considered for canonization. I was vaguely familiar with Korchinsky; I’d read his name before, but knew next to nothing about him. Obviously, I wanted to learn more. Over the past couple of days, I’ve pieced together…
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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, here are Anastasiou’s own words,…
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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 on the New Calendar, and…
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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, especially among Greeks, who call…
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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, his duties were not limited…
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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 the parish priest. He was…
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The Sorcerer on the Golden Horn
The following is a translation from the French of the article “Un Conquete du Patriarcat Oecumenique,” from Échos d’Orient, Volume 11, 1908, concerning Fr. Raphael (Robert Josias) Morgan, the first black Orthodox priest in America. The article uses his middle name “Josias.” The translation was done using Google Translate with a little cleaning afterward. A…
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The tombstone of Fr. Kallinikos Kanellas
After I published a piece on Fr. Kallinikos Kanellas earlier this week, I spoke with Fr. Nicholas Verdaris, the pastor of Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. As it turns out, the Annunciation community continues to maintain Kanellas’ gravesite, and Fr. Nicholas was kind enough to send me the above photo of Kanellas’…