History

Saint Athanasios Greek Orthodox Church was established on October 31, 1921, in a small room over a restaurant on Market Street in Paterson, New Jersey, by a handful of immigrants who came together to foster and preserve the religious and cultural heritage of their native Greece. That humble beginning in a rented room above a restaurant is the origin of what has grown, across a century, into one of the most vibrant Greek Orthodox parishes in the state.

As the parish grew through the 1920s, land was purchased in Paterson and the cornerstone for a new church structure was laid in 1928. In the decades that followed, dedicated clergy and parishioners sacrificed much for the expansion of their church, persisting in their mission with courage, faith, and conviction through the Depression, the Second World War, and the great social transformations of the postwar era. In 1979, the parish made the pivotal decision to follow its membership into the suburbs of Bergen County, acquiring a beautiful piece of land adjacent to the Saddle River in Paramus. An educational complex and social center were built there through trying and difficult times, with the complex serving as a temporary church while the community worked toward a permanent sanctuary.

Groundbreaking ceremonies for the new Byzantine church were held in 1989, and on April 19, 1992, its doors swept open, giving the parish the permanent home it had worked toward for more than seven decades since that first gathering above a Paterson restaurant. In October 2022, the parish celebrated its centennial, with Archbishop Elpidophoros of America presiding at a festive banquet and noting that the very name Athanasios, meaning the immortal or unmovable one, spoke of the unconquerable spirit that had sustained the parish across its first century of life in New Jersey.

Saint Athanasios Greek Orthodox Church at 51 Paramus Road in Paramus serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of Bergen County as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of New Jersey within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a community that no single generation has built alone but whose ongoing mission of faith links generations past, present, and future.