History

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church of Lewiston, Maine was founded in 1910, established as a small church on Lincoln Street in downtown Lewiston to serve a Greek community that at its peak numbered more than 3,000 people. Those early immigrants had been drawn to the Lewiston-Auburn area by jobs in the Bates Manufacturing Company and the surrounding textile mills, and the church became the spiritual and cultural center of one of the largest Greek communities in northern New England. Among the most treasured furnishings of the original church were icons written by a Greek iconographer in the 1910s and brought to Lewiston from Greece, icons that remain in the parish to this day.

When the mills began closing in the 1950s, Lewiston's Greek residents migrated south in large numbers to find work in the mills of Massachusetts, and the Holy Trinity community shrank dramatically. By 1967 only 135 families remained. That year a transformative priest, Father Soterios Alexopoulos, arrived and undertook the revitalization of the struggling parish, guiding the community through a difficult transition and helping it find new vitality. The growing needs of the renewed congregation led to the construction of a new church in 1977 at 155 Hogan Road, the home the parish has occupied ever since.

In December 2001, the parish launched an outreach program to serve the Pan-Orthodox community within a fifty-mile radius, offering Bible studies and seminars to the broader community and establishing Holy Trinity as a center of Orthodox witness for all of central Maine, not only for those of Greek descent. That spirit of welcome has continued to shape the parish, which has seen a growing convert population alongside its multi-generational Greek families.

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church at 155 Hogan Road in Lewiston serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of central Maine as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Boston within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a pillar of civic and spiritual life in the Lewiston-Auburn community for more than a century.