Saint Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church of Seattle

History

Saint Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church is the oldest Greek Orthodox congregation in Seattle, its roots reaching back to 1894 when Nicholas George donated his property at 817 Lakeview Avenue to what was then known as the Greek-Russian Church. The first Greek known to reach the Pacific Northwest was Apostolos Valerianos, the sixteenth-century Greek explorer known by his Spanish name Juan de Fuca, and Greeks did not begin settling in Washington State until the 1870s, with Nicholas George and George Tandou Nicholas arriving in the early 1880s on a fishing schooner. The first flood of Greek immigration followed from 1905 to 1911, and by 1915 some 2,000 Greek immigrants lived in Seattle and 8,000 across Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia.

In 1916 the Greek Orthodox Community of Seattle was incorporated and property was purchased at Yale Avenue North and Thomas Street for a church of their own. Funds were raised with great difficulty from a largely poor community, the early women of the parish going to where their men worked on paydays to intercept wages before they could be spent elsewhere. Construction began in April 1921 and the first service was held November 20, 1921, in a building that cost $50,000 and was said at the time to be the only Greek Orthodox church in the State of Washington. Father Stephanos Phoutrides, a Yale graduate and ordained priest, arrived in 1924 and served the longest tenured early pastorship, but his preference for English in services and Sunday School eventually caused a polarization that led in 1939 to a second Seattle parish, the Church of the Assumption.

By the late 1950s the Yale Avenue church could no longer accommodate the growing community and the parish undertook the construction of an entirely new church. The present Saint Demetrios Church at 2100 Boyer Avenue East in the Montlake neighborhood was designed by Paul Thiry, one of the principal architects of the 1962 Century 21 Exposition and Seattle's World's Fair, who conducted a detailed investigation of Byzantine architectural forms and adapted twentieth-century materials including thin-shell concrete and colored mosaics to ancient liturgical spatial requirements. The resulting structure, set among the wooded hills of Montlake with striated brick walls and a dome, became one of Seattle's most architecturally distinguished religious buildings. It was dedicated on March 31, 1963. A community center was added in 1979, and a sustainability-focused master plan for the campus was issued in 1999. The original Yale Avenue church was sold to fund the new building, demolished in 1995, and replaced by REI's flagship store, which installed a historical plaque commemorating the site of the first Saint Demetrios Church.

Saint Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church at 2100 Boyer Avenue East in Seattle serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of the greater Seattle area as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of San Francisco within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a community of more than 680 families, many of them third and fourth generation descendants of the original founding families, whose history mirrors the story of Greek immigration to the Pacific Northwest across more than a century.