Orthodox Churches in Delaware

In 1913 a small group of Orthodox immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian area, Russia and Ukraine met to consider forming a Russian Orthodox parish in Wilmington. In January 1915 the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of St. Michael the Archangel, now St. Michael's, was organized with 25 families, and under Fr. John Zloben it converted a Southbridge row house into a church. The first known Greek settlers had reached Wilmington near the end of the nineteenth century, and the parish now called Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral was formally organized in 1934.

Holy Trinity laid the cornerstone of its Byzantine-style church on North Broom Street in 1948. St. Michael's replaced its row-house chapel in 1950, but by 1962 the majority of parishioners were moving to the suburbs. The congregation acquired farmland on Kirkwood Highway and dedicated a church there in 1980. A cupola and gold cross added in 1990 evoke the churches of the Carpatho-Russian regions from which many original members came.

The cathedral, in the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of New Jersey, serves Delaware, southern New Jersey, northeast Maryland and parts of southeastern Pennsylvania. Saints Peter and Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA celebrates its services mainly in English. Beyond Wilmington, newer missions followed: St. Andrew the Apostle Orthodox Church in Lewes began in 2005 as an Antiochian mission, meeting first in the Grange Hall, and St. Nicholas Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Dover, requested by residents in 2007, became a full parish in 2017.