History

By 1900 a thriving community of Greek immigrants had established itself in Indianapolis, most of them young men from Tripoli and the villages of the central Peloponnese who came to America seeking opportunity and brought their Orthodox faith with them. They rented space on the third floor of 27 South Meridian Street and set up an altar and iconostasis each Sunday for Greek Orthodox services. In April 1907 Father Nicholas Velonis came from Greece to serve what the Indianapolis Star described as three hundred Greeks far away in Indianapolis who were without church or priest. On January 29, 1910, the formal charter of incorporation of the Holy Trinity Parish was filed with the Indiana Secretary of State, and the community continued to grow through the years that followed, acquiring a house at 213 North West Street and later building a brick church at 231 North West Street.

The early decades were not without turbulence. The political divisions between royalists and Venizelists that split Greek communities across America in the 1920s reached Indianapolis, ultimately resulting in a schism and protracted litigation before the Indiana courts, a painful chapter that the parish navigated and healed in time. Archbishop Athenagoras, whose firm hand helped reconcile divided communities across the country, brought a measure of peace to the Indianapolis community as he did to so many others.

As the congregation continued to grow through the mid-twentieth century, it moved to a new church at the corner of 40th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, breaking ground on August 23, 1959, and moving in on July 31, 1960, with Archbishop Iakovos participating in the occasion. The U.S. Archbishop consecrated that building on June 1, 1980, enshrining in its altar table the relics of Saint Anastasia, Saint Theodore, and Bishop Tyrone of Salonika. In 1973, Holy Trinity held its first Indy GreekFest, which grew into one of the oldest and largest ethnic festivals in Indianapolis, a beloved community tradition that continues at the Cathedral's current location.

By the 1990s membership had grown beyond what the Pennsylvania Avenue building could accommodate, and the Meridian-Kessler neighborhood's placement on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986 made expansion impossible. In 1998 Holy Trinity acquired a twenty-acre property at Shelborne and 106th Street in Carmel. Groundbreaking for the new church took place on September 30, 2006, and on Christmas Eve of 2008 the community celebrated its first Divine Services in the magnificent new Byzantine structure designed by San Francisco architect Christ Kamages of CJK Design of Los Angeles. Drawing inspiration from the Hagia Sophia, the building is distinguished as the first Triad Byzantine-design church constructed in more than 1,400 years, oriented on its site to face Jerusalem and the rising sun, and crowned by a fifty-five-foot dome weighing more than fifty tons, one of the largest Orthodox church domes in the Western Hemisphere. Iconography was painted in three phases across the Altar, Nave, and Narthex, with the final phase completed in February 2018. The church was formally consecrated in 2022.

In September 2018, Metropolitan Nicholas of Detroit announced that Holy Trinity was to be elevated to the dignity of Cathedral, recognizing more than a century of faithful witness as the only Greek Orthodox parish in Indianapolis and the spiritual anchor of Orthodox Christian life in Indiana.

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral at 3500 West 106th Street in Carmel serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of Indiana as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Detroit within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a community that grew from three hundred Greeks meeting on a rented third floor into one of the most architecturally distinguished Orthodox cathedrals in the Americas.