History

The Watertown Greek community traces its beginning to just three families in 1913. By 1923, it had grown to thirty families who organized the Greek Society of Watertown, renting a hall to serve as a Greek School and community meeting place. As more Greeks arrived and the community's needs expanded, land was purchased, a contractor was hired, and a building was completed in 1931.

In 1937, the Archdiocese approved converting the building's upper hall into a small church, formally naming it Taxiarchae/Archangels, dedicated to the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, the Taxiarchae or Commanders of the heavenly hosts. The Reverend E. Reghellis became its first pastor, and that same year the women of the parish formed the Good Samaritan Philoptochos Society to carry on charitable works, one of the first expressions of organized outreach in the young community.

The parish grew rapidly through the 1940s, and with four hundred families now calling Taxiarchae home, land was purchased on Bigelow Avenue for a larger and more permanent house of worship. By 1950 the Byzantine-style church edifice was completed. Placed in the cornerstone box at the time of its dedication were the names of all four hundred parishioners, a stone from the Acropolis, and soil from Greece mixed with American soil, a poetic gesture that captured the spirit of the community itself: the old world and the new, brought together in a new land.

Through the decades that followed, Taxiarchae grew into one of the most vibrant Greek Orthodox parishes in the greater Boston area, pioneering among its many achievements the first Parish Nurse Ministry of any Greek Orthodox parish in the United States.

Taxiarchae/Archangels Greek Orthodox Church at 25 Bigelow Avenue in Watertown serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of the greater Boston area as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Boston within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a community that grew from three families a century ago into a spiritual home of more than 500 Orthodox Christian families.