Orthodox Churches in Washington, D.C.

Orthodox parish life in the District of Columbia took shape among immigrant congregations in the early twentieth century. Greek immigrants established the parish that became Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral in 1904 and dedicated a church at 8th and L Streets NW in 1924. Syrian and Lebanese immigrants organized St. George Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church in 1908. Russian émigrés who reached the capital in the 1920s, many of them former Tsarist officers, incorporated the parish of St. Nicholas in 1930.

Another Russian parish, St. John the Baptist, was founded in 1949 with the blessing of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco. Its parish history records it as the only Orthodox church he established in the United States. President Dwight D. Eisenhower laid the cornerstone of Saint Sophia's Byzantine-style building in 1956. St. Nicholas consecrated a church modeled on the twelfth-century Cathedral of St. Dimitry in Vladimir in 1962 and dedicated it in 1963 as the National War Memorial Shrine. St. John the Baptist, a parish of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, completed its Moscow-Yaroslavl style cathedral in 1980.

In 1981, St. Nicholas was designated the see of the Primate of the Orthodox Church in America, about a decade after that body received autocephaly. Saint Sophia serves as the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America's cathedral in the capital rather than a diocesan see. Saint Tamar Georgian Orthodox Church, on Massachusetts Avenue, describes itself as the only Georgian Orthodox church in the Washington area.