Orthodox Churches in Alabama

Alabama's oldest Orthodox parish grew out of coal mining. Slovak immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire settled in Brookside in the 1890s, where the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Company mined coal. A community of coal workers established a parish there in 1894, and a historical marker calls it the first Russian Orthodox church south of the Mason-Dixon line. After a tornado and a 1912 fire destroyed two earlier churches, the congregation built St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in 1916, and it still holds regular services.

Birmingham's Greek community formed the Lord Byron Society in 1903 to raise money for a church and in 1906 founded Holy Trinity, the state's first Greek Orthodox parish. A second Birmingham parish, Holy Cross, was established in 1933, and the two merged in 1953 as Holy Trinity + Holy Cross, designated a cathedral in 1977. St. Symeon, a parish of the Orthodox Church in America, was founded in Birmingham in 1977 by second- and third-generation Greek and Russian Americans together with converts to Orthodoxy.

Elsewhere, Greek parishes date from 1912 in Mobile, the 1940s in Montgomery, and 1964 in Huntsville. Near Daphne, Jason Malbis and William Papageorge bought 120 acres in 1906 for a Greek farming community; Malbis Memorial Church, built after Malbis died in 1942 as he had instructed, was dedicated in 1965 but has never had an active congregation.