History

The story of Greek Orthodoxy in Manchester, New Hampshire begins with a single immigrant whose name has been preserved through the careful work of parish historians. According to John Z. Conides, the devoted historian who served as General Chairman of the parish's fiftieth anniversary celebration in 1955, the distinction of being the first Greek to settle in Manchester belongs to a Doctor Zervoudakes, a Cretan who arrived in the city in the opening years of the twentieth century, decades before living parishioners could recall the details firsthand.

As more Greek immigrants followed Doctor Zervoudakes to Manchester, drawn by the textile mills of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company and the opportunities of New Hampshire's largest city, the community grew quickly enough to organize a parish and begin construction of a church. The exterior of Saint George Church was completed on January 1, 1907, fittingly just one day before the name day of Saint George, the parish's patron saint, a timing the founders surely took as a sign of providence.

The parish's history, carefully documented by its own historians across the decades from 1905 to 1980, reflects the broader story of Greek immigration to industrial New England, a community of textile workers and small business owners who built a lasting house of worship in the heart of Manchester's Hanover Street corridor and sustained it through the generations that followed.

Saint George Greek Orthodox Cathedral at 650 Hanover Street in Manchester serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of southern New Hampshire as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Boston within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a community whose roots reach back to the earliest years of the twentieth century.