History

The small but remarkable Greek community of Bangor, Maine traces its origins to the 1890s, when the first Greek immigrant, George N. Brountas, arrived in the city. In the decades that followed, scores of Greek families settled, worked, and prospered in Bangor, opening restaurants so numerous that at one point nearly every other eatery in the city was Greek-owned. The three Brountas brothers who descended from that founding family all became mayors of Bangor, a distinction the city later honored with a formal proclamation acknowledging their contribution and that of Saint George Church to the life of the community.

In 1926, members of the Greek Orthodox faithful pledged $1,200 to formally organize the Saint George Eastern Orthodox Community of Bangor. Among those whose generosity helped make the church possible was Stavros Niarchos, one of the most celebrated Greek shipowners of the twentieth century, who donated funds to support the construction. In a moment of founding drama that parish members have long remembered, construction of the wood-framed, white clapboard building on Sanford Street began in November 1929 when one of the congregation's founders persuaded a man who was already digging a foundation for a house on the street to dig one for the church on a nearby lot the community owned. At that moment, the church had exactly twenty-three dollars in its coffers. Peter N. Brountas and several other men went to a local bank for a construction loan, putting up personal furniture as collateral without telling their wives, a sacrifice that the Brountas family kept secret for years. The building was completed by 1930, its Gothic windows and white clapboard exterior indistinguishable from thousands of New England Protestant churches, standing quietly on Sanford Street as the northernmost Greek Orthodox community in the United States.

The church has served as the Orthodox Christian epicenter not only of Bangor but of the entire region, with its priest holding monthly services in Waterville and during summers in Southwest Harbor. Greeks, Americans, Russians, Ukrainians, Egyptians, and converts from many backgrounds come together at Saint George's each week, making it a genuinely Pan-Orthodox community for all of northern Maine.

Saint George Greek Orthodox Church at 90 Sanford Street in Bangor serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of northern Maine as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Boston within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, the only Eastern Orthodox church in northern Maine and one of the most northerly Orthodox parishes in the continental United States.