Holy Trinity Cathedral of New Orleans

History

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral of New Orleans holds a distinction shared by no other Orthodox parish in the Western Hemisphere: it is the first Greek Orthodox church ever established in North or South America, its founding the opening chapter of the entire story of Greek Orthodoxy in the New World.

The Greek presence in New Orleans stretches back to the mid-eighteenth century. Michel Dragon, a Greek merchant and Spanish Army lieutenant who fought with the Patriots in the American Revolution, arrived in New Orleans before the city became part of the United States, and his family's descendants would later contribute to the founding of the parish. By the early nineteenth century, Orthodox Christians from Greece, the Balkans, Slavic nations, and the Middle East were working in the city as coffee shop owners, fish merchants, fruit sellers, cotton brokers, and seafood workers in the parishes south of the city. In 1861, Greeks in New Orleans formed their own militia company, The Greek Company A, Louisiana Militia, to fight in the Civil War.

The organized community traces its formal beginning to 1864, when Nicholas Benachi, a merchant from the island of Chios who served as Consul of the Royal Government of Greece, offered his personal home at 2257 Bayou Road for Orthodox worship services. The following spring, Father Agapius Honcharenko, a Ukrainian priest with the Russian Orthodox Mission in Athens, arrived at Benachi's invitation to baptize approximately thirty individuals and celebrate Paschal services at Saint Paul's Episcopal Church. In 1866 the first Greek Orthodox church building in the Americas was constructed at 1222 North Dorgenois Street in the Treme neighborhood, and in December 1867 Archimandrite Stefanos Andreadis arrived as its first priest. The community that gathered around that first building comprised not only Greeks but Serbian, Croatian, Dalmatian, Romanian, and Russian Orthodox Christians, reflecting the Pan-Orthodox character of early New Orleans religious life. Among its most treasured possessions is an icon of the Blessed Mother of God gifted to Holy Trinity by the Russian imperial family in 1872.

As the decades passed the original Treme church grew and was enriched with a school, parish house, library, and cemetery. In 1950 a brick cathedral replaced the original structure on North Dorgenois, and in 1960, marking the centennial of Benachi's first organizing efforts, Holy Trinity was consecrated as a Cathedral. By 1976, the community had outgrown that home, and the North Dorgenois property was sold to Saint Luke's Episcopal Church. The community relocated to Robert E. Lee Boulevard, now known as Allen Toussaint Boulevard, where a community center was completed in 1980 and the present Cathedral was erected and consecrated in December 1985, its Byzantine iconography completed by Lawrence Manos.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 severely flooded the Cathedral and its Hellenic Center in the Lakeview neighborhood. When parishioners entered after the storm, they found that the floodwaters had miraculously stopped at the solea, with an icon of the Panagia floating on the water. The Cathedral reopened within five months, and the community has described Katrina as a turning point that deepened its commitment to engaging and leading the broader New Orleans community. The annual New Orleans Greek Festival, held each Memorial Day weekend, draws visitors from across the Gulf Coast to the Cathedral and its Hellenic Center, celebrating more than a century and a half of Hellenic life in the Crescent City.

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral at 1200 Allen Toussaint Boulevard in New Orleans serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of Louisiana as a Cathedral of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Atlanta within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, the oldest and most historically significant Greek Orthodox parish in the Americas, its founding a gift to the entire Orthodox world in the New World.