History

Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Merrillville, Indiana was founded in 1913 in the city of Gary, making it one of the oldest Greek Orthodox parishes in the state and a community whose history is inseparable from the story of the steel industry that built northwest Indiana. Greek immigrants drawn by the mills and manufacturing plants of the Calumet Region established the parish in Gary in the early years of the twentieth century, and for nearly six decades the church served the Greek Orthodox faithful of Lake County from its Gary location.

As the postwar decades brought the familiar pattern of suburban migration to northwest Indiana, the congregation followed its members southward. In 1971 the Greek Hall was built at the current location on Madison Street in Merrillville, and the first church service at the new site was celebrated on Thanksgiving Day of that year, a fitting occasion for a community beginning a new chapter. The Cathedral building itself was constructed in the years that followed and was consecrated in September 1981, completing the campus that has served the parish ever since.

In 2013, the parish celebrated its centennial, honoring a hundred years of Greek Orthodox life in Lake County. The Cathedral pastor at the time observed that the first seventy-five years of the church's ministry were focused on establishing and building the community, completing the relocation from Gary to Merrillville, constructing and furnishing the new complex, and retiring its debts, while the subsequent decades were devoted to developing a broader ministry of philanthropy and outreach to those beyond the parish's own flock. The annual Grecian Festival, now in its fifth decade, has become one of the most beloved Hellenic cultural events in the Calumet Region, drawing the broader Lake County community to Madison Street each year for Greek food, music, and dance.

Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Cathedral at 8000 Madison Street in Merrillville serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of northwest Indiana as a Cathedral of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.