History

Transfiguration Greek Orthodox Church of Franklin, New Hampshire was established in 1930, one of three parishes founded that year to serve the Orthodox Christian faithful of northern New Hampshire, alongside the Holy Trinity community in Concord and the Taxiarchai community in Laconia. The three parishes were established together to extend Orthodox Christian worship into the communities of the Lakes Region and Merrimack Valley, where Greek immigrants had settled in sufficient numbers to sustain parish life but not yet enough to support full-time clergy of their own.

The founders of the Franklin parish were Mr. and Mrs. Steve Barry, Mr. and Mrs. James Liolis, Mr. and Mrs. Christy Thomas, Mr. and Mrs. Alex Stavro, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Soter, Mr. and Mrs. James Shanelaris, Mr. and Mrs. Steve Anastos, and Mr. and Mrs. George Loli, eight families whose shared faith and determination gave the Transfiguration community its beginning. In the early years the three northern New Hampshire parishes shared the services of a single clergyman, a common arrangement for small Greek Orthodox communities in rural New England where the faithful were spread across wide distances.

The Transfiguration parish serves as a Pareklision, or dependent chapel, of the Holy Trinity parish in Concord, with the priest of Holy Trinity traveling to Franklin to celebrate the Divine Liturgy one Saturday each month and other services throughout the year, an arrangement that has sustained the small Franklin community in its Orthodox Christian life across nearly a century.

Transfiguration Greek Orthodox Church at 26 South Sulloway Street in Franklin serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of the central New Hampshire lakes and river region as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Boston within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.