History

The very first Greek immigrant to settle in Canton, Ohio was a tailor named George Loukas, who arrived in 1898. By 1900 some fifty Greeks had followed, and by 1909 the fast-growing Greek immigrant community of Canton began thinking seriously about building a church where they could honor their Orthodox faith and retain their Greek heritage and culture for their ever-growing families. In 1914 they purchased a lot at 6th Street and Walnut South, and three years later, in 1917, construction of the new church began with a budget of approximately $60,000. The building was completed in 1919 and the congregation chose its patron saint by drawing a name from a hat. The name drawn was Haralambos, the beloved second-century priest-martyr from Magnesia in Asia Minor who endured extraordinary torture at the age of 113 rather than renounce Christ, and who is venerated throughout the Orthodox world as a protector of shepherds and a powerful intercessor.

Saint Haralambos was established as the parish for supporters of the Greek King Constantine, while those who backed Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos formed the separate Holy Trinity parish in the city. This Royalist-Venizelist division of the Canton Greek community into two parishes was not unusual in that era, as the same political passions split Greek communities across America. Through the Depression of the 1930s the parishioners not only survived but bought and burned the mortgage on the church, a remarkable achievement during those lean years. The Ladies Philoptochos Society was established and organized in 1926, launching decades of charitable work in the greater Canton community.

By the early 1940s it was clear that the congregation had outgrown its downtown church and that the surrounding neighborhood had shifted, leaving the building no longer centrally located for its members. A ten-acre plot of land on Harvard Avenue NW was purchased in 1951, and after years of planning and fundraising the congregation voted by 92 percent in favor of a dramatic solution: moving the existing church building four miles through the center of Canton to its new home. The move, which began on April 16, 1958, when the Mural and Son Company of Cleveland split the building in half with workmen carefully removing the precious stained glass windows, the heavy slate roof, and a sixteen-foot section of the structure before covering each exposed side with wood and tar paper. It took several trucks and sixty wheels of steel beams to pull the two halves of the church through Canton's streets, with traffic stopping and residents lining the sidewalks to witness the extraordinary spectacle. The first half took eighteen days to move; the second half took just eight. The entire project, which also included a new forty-eight-foot addition, a new hall, and a restored portico, took ten months to complete at a total cost of $200,000, half of which the congregation raised in two months by going door-to-door and hosting fundraising teas and luncheons in their homes.

The church that arrived at its Harvard Avenue home carried within it much of what the original builders had crafted: the carving over the front door reading "In church bless the Name of the Lord," the front doors, the choir loft, the chandelier, the solea, and the altar, all surviving the remarkable journey intact. In the early 1980s a fire damaged only the icon of Saint Haralambos on the icon wall, leaving everything else untouched, a fact the community has long regarded as miraculous. A beautiful event center, the Krassas Event Center, was added to the parish campus in 2010, completing a complex that has served as the spiritual and cultural center of Canton's Greek Orthodox community for more than a century.

Saint Haralambos Greek Orthodox Church at 251 25th Street NW in Canton serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of Stark County as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Pittsburgh within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, one of the ten treasures of Stark County and a community whose determination to carry its church across four miles of Canton streets stands as one of the most remarkable acts of communal devotion in American Greek Orthodox history.