History

The Holy Mother Queen of All, Panagia Pantovasilissa Greek Orthodox Church of Lexington, Kentucky carries one of the most extraordinary origin stories of any Greek Orthodox parish in America, a story that stretches back more than fifteen centuries to the great church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

According to the tradition of the parish, the sacred icon of the Panagia Pantovasilissa, believed to be one of four icons painted by the Evangelist Luke, once resided in Hagia Sophia. Shortly before Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks on May 29, 1453, the icon was cast into the Sea of Marmara to prevent its desecration. It was found on the shore of Triglia, a town on the coast of Asia Minor, where it was enshrined in a Byzantine monastery converted into a church bearing its name, Panagia Pantovasilissa, meaning Holy Mother Queen of All. Through the centuries that followed, the icon was the source of many blessings and miracles for the people of Triglia.

In 1922, during the Asia Minor Catastrophe, the people of Triglia were driven from their homes by the Turks. The icon was saved and entrusted to the Byzantine Museum of Athens. Many of the refugees resettled in Rafina, Greece, where they built a new church of the Panagia Pantovasilissa, which enshrines the original icon to this day. Others made their way to America. Greek immigrants from Triglia and Rafina began clustering in Central Kentucky after the First World War and several Balkan conflicts, and by 1948 they founded a mission parish in Lexington, naming it Panagia Pantovasilissa to preserve the legacy of their ancestors. The parish became the first church in the United States dedicated to the Panagia Pantovasilissa.

The first church building on Tates Creek Road was dedicated in 1953. Helen Kafoglis, whose parents originated from Triglia, commissioned Hieromonk Seraphim Oftalmopoulou of Karayae Monastery on Mount Athos to paint a copy of the sacred icon, which was delivered to Lexington in 1956, along with additional iconostasis icons that arrived in 1959. One founding parishioner's father had personally dug the foundation of that first temple with a shovel. After more than sixty years in that location, the parish initiated construction of a new church in fall 2013 and moved to its present home at the intersection of Tates Creek Road and Rebecca Drive in December 2015.

The Holy Mother Queen of All, Panagia Pantovasilissa Greek Orthodox Church at 3001 Tates Creek Road in Lexington serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of the Bluegrass region as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Detroit within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a community whose name and icon connect it to the earliest centuries of Byzantine Christianity and to the refugees who carried that heritage across the sea.