History

The Dormition of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church of Somersworth, New Hampshire was established in 1920, founded by Greek immigrants who had come to the Strafford County mill town in the early decades of the twentieth century. Many of those founding parishioners arrived as a result of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the subsequent population exchanges between Greece and Turkey that displaced hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Christians from their ancestral homelands, sending waves of refugees to seek new lives in America. These early immigrants found work in the local factories and industrial plants that once defined the economy of the Somersworth and Dover area, and in the tradition of Greek Orthodox communities everywhere they built a house of worship as one of their first collective acts in the new land.

For more than a century the Dormition Church has served as a spiritual center for generations of Greek Orthodox Christians in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire, celebrating the ancient liturgical and sacramental life of the Eastern Church and maintaining the Hellenic heritage and Orthodox faith for those who have worshipped within its walls across four generations. The parish gathers for the Divine Liturgy on the second and fourth Sunday of each month, a schedule that reflects the small but devoted character of a community that has outlasted the industrial economy that brought its founders to the Cocheco River valley.

The Dormition of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church in Somersworth serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of Strafford County as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Boston within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, dedicated to the great feast of August 15 when the Orthodox Church commemorates the falling asleep of the Theotokos and her translation into the heavenly Kingdom.