History

The Presentation of the Virgin Mary Chapel of Daphne, Alabama, known to generations of visitors as the Malbis Memorial Church, stands as one of the most extraordinary expressions of Greek Orthodox faith and immigrant vision in the entire American South. Its story begins with a man born Antonios Markopoulos in the village of Doumena, Greece, who had served as an Orthodox monk before making his way to America and adopting the name Jason Malbis. In 1906, Malbis and his friend William Papageorge purchased 120 acres of thickly wooded and largely unsettled land near Daphne in Baldwin County, Alabama, for five dollars an acre. Three years later they purchased an additional 600 acres, and the Malbis Plantation was born. Other Greek families joined the colony, which at its height in the 1920s numbered as many as 85 people. The self-sufficient plantation eventually encompassed its own power plant, dairy, cannery, bank, garage, nursery, timber company, motel, bakery in nearby Mobile, and more than 10,000 acres of property.

Malbis was in Greece when the Axis occupation of the country during World War II prevented his return to Alabama. He died there in 1942, leaving behind a letter recording his last wish: that the colony build a Greek Orthodox church dedicated to Mary Theotokos in Malbis. Fundraising began immediately but it took twenty years to raise the more than one million dollars needed for construction, a remarkable achievement given that by the early 1960s only forty members of the colony remained on the plantation. The construction funds were ultimately secured through the sale of the plantation's bakery on Broad Street in Mobile. The church was dedicated on January 3, 1965, with Archbishop Iakovos of America officiating at the opening service before Orthodox faithful gathered from across the South.

The building that rose on Highway 181 is one of the most architecturally distinguished Greek Orthodox churches in the United States. Cruciform in plan and inspired by the Church of Ayia Paraskevi in Athens, it is built of brick, limestone, and marble. Its exterior features domed towers flanking the western entrance, a stone arcade with three sets of doors topped by arched mosaics, and mosaic panels depicting the four Evangelists, all created by Italian artist Sirio Tonelli, whose work was executed in his workshop in Pietrasanta and shipped to Alabama for installation. The interior is nearly entirely covered in hand-painted iconography by Greek iconographer Spyros Tziouvaras and his assistants, including the great Pantocrator in the dome ceiling, painted from scaffolding seventy-five feet above the floor, with Tziouvaras spending three months on his back applying brushstrokes to the ceiling. The white marble iconostasis, bishop's throne, and pulpit were hand-carved from stone quarried in the ancient quarries of Mount Pentelicus north of Athens, the same quarries that supplied marble for the Parthenon. The remains of Jason Malbis were brought from Greece and reinterred in a crypt within the church after its completion.

The Presentation of the Virgin Mary Chapel at 29300 Alabama Highway 181 in Daphne is formally known as the Holy Patriarchal and Stavropegial Monastery of the Entrance of the Theotokos, placed under the direct jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, a status that connects this corner of Baldwin County directly to the ancient see of the Orthodox Church in the great city the Greeks call the City of God.