History

The first Greek immigrants arrived in western Colorado in the early 1900s, most of them from a Greece that had only recently shed centuries of Ottoman rule. Many came without formal education, the long years of Turkish occupation having denied them that opportunity, but they brought with them a willingness to work hard and a deep Orthodox Christian faith. In the high desert country of the Western Slope, they found work raising sheep, a skill many carried from their villages in Greece, and they established homes and families in and around Grand Junction, making it the center of Greek Orthodox life in the region.

For decades the community gathered in private homes, celebrating name days and feast days together and relying on visiting clergy for the sacraments of the Church. As households multiplied and the community's identity deepened, the desire to build a church of their own grew into a determined resolve. Saint Nicholas was chosen as the patron saint in part because his December feast day fell at a time of year when sheepmen could traditionally be in town for religious observances, a detail that captures the pastoral character of the community itself.

In 1956 the current property on a hillside at the southwest corner of 12th Street and Horizon Drive was purchased, a site chosen with deliberate meaning: Greek villages were often built on hillsides, and the elevation gave the future church a visible presence over the Grand Valley. A meeting hall designed by Grand Junction architect Robert Hightower was completed in 1958, the same year the parish was incorporated in Colorado and granted an Ecclesiastical Charter from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese. That original hall now forms the western section of the present parish complex. In 1991 the Byzantine-style church building was erected, completing the campus and giving the Saint Nicholas community the permanent and visible house of worship that its immigrant founders had always envisioned.

Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church at 3585 North 12th Street in Grand Junction serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of western Colorado and eastern Utah as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Denver within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a multi-cultural community of Greek Americans, Armenian, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian faithful alongside American converts united in the ancient faith their immigrant forebears carried across the ocean.