Alaska has been in the news lately and this story from our archives describes the state’s multivariate Orthodoxy…

Greek church in Anchorage has Orthodox of all stripes

by Dimitri C. Michalakis

When Helen Hercha moved to Alaska almost fifty years ago she was looking for a Russian Orthodox church where she could worship when she heard about a Russian priest holding services in his home. His brother-in-law was George Pogas and through him she was invited to attend services at the Holy Transfiguration Greek Orthodox Church on Arctic Boulevard and Tudor in Anchorage.

“Which we did," remembers the 85-year-old grandmother who has been a parishioner ever since. "And then the Serbian people came, more Greek people came, more Russian people came out of the woodwork, and it was growing."

Today the church operates out of a converted mansion on O'Malley Road (that is also the future site of a new church in the works) and the congregation is four times its original size, but its multivaried heritage remains.

"It's a very diverse community," admits pastor Fr. John Roll, 37, who was youth director for the San Francisco diocese before his appointment to Alaska. "There are Ukrainians, Russians, Rumanians, Arabs. For instance, we'll say the Lord's Prayer in seven different languages. That's a tradition they've kept here."

And though the Russian Orthodox church has now proliferated in Alaska, the ties established by the original families to Holy Transfiguration remain strong.

“I have spent so much time at the Greek church and I had a little granddaughter that was born and was buried in the Greek church," says Helen Hercha.

She's used to it because back in Coaldale, Pennsylvania where she grew up, the Greeks who lived in town had no church of their own and attended services at the Russian church.

"We would put in the Kyrie Eleison for the Greek people that were attending," recalls the mother of five kids, who mostly grew up in the Greek church.

The Transfiguration community runs a Greek school, Sunday school, and chapters of JOY, GOYA and YAL. But keeping in character, on the second floor it also houses a private school, the Atheneum School, run by parishioner Lydia Ossorgin and using the "Socratic approach."

"This is one way of doing outreach to the community," says Fr. Roll. "We're putting our emphasis on education, because it tends to get neglected. This private school is a very excellent school and by allowing them to come in and rent space from us, we're kind of helping each other out, yet providing a nice service to the local community."

The talk of the local community, in fact, is the August Greek festival of the church, which is one of the liveliest events in town and features the celebrated Vorio Sellas dancers who, as director Diane Primis says, "have developed from young children struggling to learn the unfamiliar steps to the mature and elegant young adult dancers that I (have) witnessed."

In fact, the church is not only a place of worship, but in a state with a population as diverse and transient as Alaska has, the church also serves as a family and home away from home.

"I would say the majority of the people up here don't have families, I mean extended families, grandparents, uncles, cousins, because most of us came from other areas of the country," says Cathy Copadis, who came from New England twenty years ago. "In some respects, I'd have to say that probably makes us a closer-knit group."

John Tsakres, now in his late-80s, was working in Piraeus when he met his wife Goldie in the 1950s. She had lived in Alaska since 1936 and after they got married, they moved there and ran what he says was "the best restaurant in town"--the Anchorage Grill. The cold was bitter, he remembers, but the summers were refreshing: "It's green all over, and we don't have heat."

Helen Hercha first read about Alaska in her fourth grade geography book and was entranced: "It showed a group of Eskimos standing in the snow around a whale they had caught and were preparing to share and that fascinated me."

©2008 NEOCORP MEDIA

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