History

Saint Elias the Prophet Greek Orthodox Church of Santa Fe, New Mexico holds a distinction shared by no other Greek Orthodox parish in the United States: at 7,090 feet above sea level, it is the highest-altitude Greek Orthodox church in the country. The dedication of a church to the fiery Old Testament prophet on a desert hillside carries particular resonance, as churches and monasteries named for Saint Elias are traditionally found on high ground, commemorating his victory over the priests of Baal at Mount Carmel and his forty-day sojourn in a cave on Mount Horeb.

His Grace Bishop Kallistos of the Greek Orthodox Diocese of Denver designated the Santa Fe community a mission parish early in 1990, with the Reverend Father Dimitri Callozo assigned as the first priest. The founding members were Alexander and Niki Constantaras, Frank and Alice Carris, and Peter and Dolores Ballas, and during the early years Divine Liturgy was celebrated in the library room of Saint Bede's Episcopal Church of Santa Fe. On July 25, 1990, the Constantaras and Carris families donated 4.3 acres of land in Santa Fe's Dos Griegos neighborhood as the site for the future church. New Mexico architect Jorge de la Torre designed a Byzantine-style cruciform church crowned by a central octagonal dome, painted white and visible from U.S. 285, recalling in the words of one parishioner the kind of church you would see in the hills above a village in Greece.

The $320,000 needed for construction came from three sources: parish fundraising, a bank loan, and what the community has always regarded as a miracle. On September 14, 1992, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, while parishioners were receiving blessed bread and flowers at Saint Bede's, someone slipped into the room and placed a brown-paper bag in the candle offering tray. The bag was found to contain $20,000 in cash, the exact amount needed to complete the building. Construction of the exterior was completed in the spring of 1993, and the church's interior was enriched over the following decades through the work of Father Callozo himself, whose innate artistic ability produced the first icons, and parishioners Alexander Constantaras and architect Efthimios Maniatis, who designed and fabricated the iconostasis, altar table, stasidia, and stonework by hand. A comprehensive iconography program begun in 1998 was completed in May 2016, and the church was formally consecrated in 2017, twenty-five years after its founding.

Saint Elias the Prophet Greek Orthodox Church at 46 Calle Electra in Santa Fe serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Denver within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, conducting services in Greek, English, Spanish, Arabic, Slavonic, and Romanian, a reflection of the diverse Orthodox Christian community that has gathered on this high desert hillside.