History

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church of Dallas, Texas was founded in 1915 by Greek immigrants and Orthodox Christians from other countries who had settled in Dallas and recognized the pressing need for an Eastern Orthodox church in the city. A year earlier, the Hermes Society, a Greek-American benevolent society, had been established to serve the community. A charter for the Holy Trinity parish was obtained in November 1915, and three days later Father Paisios Ferentinos traveled from New Orleans to celebrate the first Greek Orthodox Liturgy in Dallas.

In 1916 the community built its first church on the corner of Sanger and Riggs Streets in South Dallas, a wood-frame structure designed to be temporary, as many Greeks in Dallas at the time still harbored hopes of returning to Greece. The building cost approximately $10,000, financed in part through a five-year, $6,000 loan provided by a Methodist minister who owned a lumberyard, sold the lumber for construction, and secured the contractor, all without charging interest. The loan was repaid in just three years. Political turmoil in Greece kept the Dallas Greek community ebbing and flowing through the 1920s, but the parish put down steadily deeper roots. On July 18, 1937, the Holy Trinity Church on Riggs Street was formally consecrated. In the late 1930s, Archbishop Athenagoras, who would later become Ecumenical Patriarch, visited Dallas and celebrated with the community.

By the early 1950s the South Dallas neighborhood had changed significantly and the congregation had spread across the city. The parish relocated to a new building at Swiss and Apple Streets, where it remained for four decades and where it flourished through choir, youth activities, stage productions, and the founding of the annual Greek Food Festival of Dallas in 1956, which grew into one of the most celebrated Greek cultural events in the American Southwest. In 1992 the parish relocated again, this time to its present home at Hillcrest and Alpha Roads in North Dallas. The beautiful Byzantine-style church that now stands at 13555 Hillcrest Road has been progressively enriched with iconography by internationally renowned iconographer Leonidas Diamantopoulos, undertaken in phases beginning with the parish's centennial in 2015.

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church at 13555 Hillcrest Road in Dallas serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of North Texas as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Denver within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a welcoming, progressive community committed to philanthropy and civic engagement that has shaped Greek Orthodox life in Texas for more than a century.