History

Saint Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church of Saco, Maine was established in 1909, making it the first Greek Orthodox church in the State of Maine. The parish served the Greek Orthodox faithful of the Biddeford-Saco area from its earliest days, and on September 17, 1914, a Certificate of Organization of a Corporation was formally granted to the Greek Orthodox Community of Biddeford and Saco, giving the community its legal standing as a religious body.

For its first decades the parish was located in Biddeford, where in 1937 the community occupied a building on Adams Street that had been constructed in 1855. That building served as the Hellenic Church for more than sixty years, witnessing the full arc of the Biddeford-Saco Greek community's life through the Depression, World War II, and the postwar years. In 1994 the parish purchased eleven acres on Bradley Street in Saco, and on May 1, 1999, Metropolitan Methodios of Boston presided at the groundbreaking for the new church. On January 20, 2000, in a ceremony that echoed the move from the community's first quarters to the Adams Street building in 1937, parishioners carried icons and furnishings from the old church in Biddeford to the new church in Saco, a ritual passage that connected the community's past and present in a single act of devotion.

In October 2009, the parish celebrated its centennial, with Metropolitan Methodios presiding at a Hierarchical Divine Liturgy on the Feast of Saint Demetrios attended by Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, area clergy, and friends of the parish from across New England.

Saint Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church at 186 Bradley Street in Saco serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of southern Maine as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Boston within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, the oldest Greek Orthodox community in Maine and a church sited on a heavily wooded ten-acre tract that gives the parish a distinctive and peaceful setting in the Biddeford-Saco area.