Saint Paul Greek Orthodox Church of Savannah

History

The first Greek Orthodox Church in Savannah was organized around 1900, making it one of the earliest Greek Orthodox communities in the American South. The parish received its formal charter in 1907, the same year it acquired a church building from Saint Paul's Episcopal Church on the corner of Barnard and Duffy Streets. Rather than rename the building, the Greek community chose to retain the name Saint Paul's, and Saint Paul's Greek Orthodox Church of Savannah has carried that name ever since.

Through the 1920s and 1930s the community built its organizational life alongside its spiritual one. The local AHEPA chapter was organized in 1923. The first Sunday School for children was established in the late 1920s. The first mixed choir was organized in 1930, with robes sewn by the mothers of the community, replacing the traditional cantor with the male and female voices that have led the parish's worship ever since. On February 24, 1931, Archbishop Athenagoras Day was proclaimed in Savannah, and the Archbishop officiated at services, a visit that brought the energy of the newly unified Archdiocese to the Savannah parish. In 1932 the Ladies Philoptochos Chapter of Saint Barbara was formed under the Archbishop's encouragement.

A defining moment in the parish's history came on August 25, 1941, when Saint Paul's purchased the Lawton Memorial Building from the City of Savannah, a magnificent Victorian structure built in 1897 and 1898 as a memorial to Confederate General Alexander R. Lawton and his daughter Corrine. A two-year renovation transformed the building into a beautiful house of Orthodox Christian worship, and on May 9, 1943, Bishop Gerasimos dedicated the new church. In 1951 the Hellenic Center opened across West Anderson Street, the first of its kind in the entire Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. The Georgia Historical Society dedicated a historical marker to General Lawton and Saint Paul's Greek Orthodox Church on May 22, 2001, which stands outside the church to tell all who pass the story of the building and the community it shelters.

In January 2000 the parish began a major renovation of the church interior and exterior, completed in early 2001. The church building is listed on the Historic Savannah Register as a Victorian-style edifice converted into a house of Orthodox Christian worship in the cross-in-square style adapted to the Orthodox liturgical tradition. In 1985 the parish launched the Savannah Greek Festival, held each October, which has grown into an annual highlight on Savannah's tourism and cultural calendar.

Saint Paul's Greek Orthodox Church at 14 West Anderson Street in Savannah serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of coastal Georgia as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Atlanta within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, one of the oldest and most historically significant Greek Orthodox parishes in the American South and the mother church of the Saint George Chapel mission in Brunswick.