History

The rapid industrialization of Utah at the turn of the twentieth century drew Greek immigrants to Salt Lake City by the thousands, lured by work in the Utah copper pit at Bingham Canyon, the mill-smelter towns of Midvale, Murray, Magna, Garfield, and Tooele, and the coal mining activities of Carbon and Emery Counties. The first Greek to settle in Utah, Nicholas Kastro, arrived in the 1870s, and by 1900 the Census counted just three Greeks in the state. Within a decade that number had grown to more than 4,000 in Salt Lake County alone, and by 1915 an estimated 20,000 Greeks were in the labor force in Utah and the surrounding region.

On January 22, 1905, over 200 members of the Greek community met in the Odd Fellows Building in Salt Lake City to organize a church of their own. Within months, a property was purchased at 439 West 400 South and a loan of $7,000 was negotiated with Walker Brothers Bank for construction. A priest arrived from Greece that spring, and on October 29, 1905, the first Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church was dedicated, becoming the fourteenth organized Greek Orthodox parish community in the United States and the oldest between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Coast. The church served not only Greeks but also Serbian, Russian, and other Orthodox Christians who found in it the spiritual center of immigrant life in the Salt Lake Valley. Greek Town, the section of the city bounded by Second, Third, and Fourth South between First and Sixth West, grew up around the church as the economic, social, and residential heart of Utah's Greek immigrant world, with some 340 Greek-owned and operated businesses spread across the greater Salt Lake area by 1916.

By 1915 it was obvious to community leaders that a new and larger church was needed. The old building was sold, new land was acquired at Third South and Second West, and the cornerstone of the present cathedral was laid on August 23, 1923. The first service in the new building was celebrated on August 13, 1924, and the building was officially opened on August 2, 1925, after the construction loan was fully retired. The building was designed in the Byzantine style, an architectural choice as striking in its Utah context then as it is now, by the local firm of Pope and Burton in collaboration with Greek architect N.A. Dokas of Chicago. Iconography was added to the interior in 1939, stained glass windows installed in 1957, and a major renovation costing $4.2 million was completed between 1997 and 2005. In April 1968, Archbishop Iakovos visited Salt Lake City and elevated Holy Trinity to the status of Cathedral. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, and a Hellenic Historical Monument was dedicated on the Cathedral grounds in 1988. In 1992 the Hellenic Cultural Museum opened in the Cathedral's lower level, the only Greek ethnic museum in the United States, documenting the history of Greek immigration to Utah and the Salt Lake Valley.

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral at 279 South 300 West in Salt Lake City serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of the greater Salt Lake Valley as the first of two churches forming the Greek Orthodox Church of Greater Salt Lake, a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Denver within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, the oldest Greek Orthodox community west of the Mississippi and a Cathedral that has shaped Hellenic and Orthodox life in the Mountain West for more than a century.