Orthodox Churches in Arizona

Serbian Orthodox immigrants began arriving in the mining town of Bisbee in the 1880s, and their congregation built the copper-domed St. Stephen Nemanja Serbian Orthodox Church there in 1953. Bisbee's copper man statue was modeled on a Serbian miner. In Phoenix, the history of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral records that the first Greeks to arrive, in 1909, were the brothers Charles and Chris Sanichas, who opened fruit and confectionery stores downtown. In 1930 the community founded what that history calls the first Hellenic Orthodox church in Arizona.

In Phoenix, the Antiochian parish of St. George was incorporated in 1949. Holy Trinity moved to its present site on East Maryland Avenue in 1973 and was proclaimed a cathedral in 1988. Parishes of the Greek, Russian, Antiochian and Serbian traditions, among others, cluster in the Phoenix and Tucson areas, with smaller communities in towns such as Bisbee, Prescott and Yuma.

St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery near Florence was founded in 1995, when Elder Ephraim, a former abbot of a Mount Athos monastery, sent six monks to the Sonoran Desert. Described as the largest Orthodox monastic complex in the Western Hemisphere, it receives pilgrims and day visitors. In Glendale, the Monastery of St. Mary of Egypt, a community of nuns in the Diocese of the West of the Orthodox Church in America, was established in 2021; its sisters had lived together in Egypt for more than twenty years before relocating to the United States.