Annunciation Cathedral of Detroit

History

The Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Detroit is the oldest Greek Orthodox parish in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, its roots reaching back to the early 1880s when the first Greek immigrants, predominantly from the region around Sparta, settled in Detroit. The State of Michigan issued a charter for the Evangelismos Theotokou Greek Orthodox Church on March 25, 1910, a date of particular significance as it also marks the Feast of the Annunciation of the Theotokos and Greek Independence Day. The first priest to serve was the Reverend Father Nathaniel Sideris, the same pioneering clergyman who would subsequently establish Greek Orthodox churches in Cincinnati and Detroit. In those earliest years the community gathered in a rented second-story auditorium at 42 Broadway Street in the heart of what would become Greektown.

In 1913 the parish erected its first permanent church building at 660 Macomb Street, and the following year built a Greek parochial school on adjacent land, reflecting the community's twin commitment to faith and education from the very beginning. The name of the parish was changed to Central Greek Orthodox Church Evangelismos in 1949, and when the 7th Diocesan District of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Detroit was established in 1962, Bishop Germanos Polizoidis designated the Macomb Street church as the Cathedral, giving it its present name: Annunciation Cathedral.

The Cathedral's present home carries its own remarkable story. In 1964 the City of Detroit announced the purchase of all the parish's Macomb Street properties to make way for the construction of Interstate 375, the freeway that would raze the historic Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods along with the Cathedral itself. The City compensated the parish with $50,000 and half a city block on East Lafayette Street at the Chrysler Freeway Service Drive, a poignant exchange in which the very freeway that destroyed the original cathedral provided the land for its successor. Ground was broken in 1966 for the new church, designed by architect John W. Loizon and inspired by the Church of Saint Andrew in Petras, Greece, envisioning a building with twin towers and white and black marble finishes.

Construction proceeded in phases across more than three decades, a story that has been compared to Detroit's own version of the Sagrada Familia. Services began in the basement in the spring of 1968. A door-opening ceremony served as a dedication on March 20, 1977. The walls were raised to their current height and the dome added in 1993, with the cross atop the dome hoisted into place on March 26, 1996. The first iconography, the Platytera, was completed on March 21, 1999, and the Pantokrator Dome's iconography was finished in 2005, completing an interior of extraordinary Byzantine richness thirty-seven years after the first service in the basement.

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral at 707 East Lafayette Street in Detroit serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of the greater Detroit metropolitan area as the Cathedral and seat of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Detroit within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, the mother church of Greek Orthodoxy across Michigan, Kentucky, Arkansas, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, and New York, and a living monument to the endurance of the Detroit Hellenic community across more than a century of parish life.