Orthodox Churches in Louisiana

Greeks are documented in New Orleans from the mid-1700s, and in the 1800s they included cotton and sugar merchants. Holy Trinity Church dates its founding to 1864, when the merchant Nicholas Benachi offered his home for worship. In 1865 Father Agapius Honcharenko, a priest with the Russian Orthodox Mission in Athens, was invited to the city to baptize about 30 people, and a church was built in 1866. Archimandrite Stefanos Andreadis arrived as its first priest in December 1867. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese describes Holy Trinity as the first Greek Orthodox church in the Americas.

The congregation grew with early twentieth-century immigration, and in 1950 a brick cathedral replaced the original church as Holy Trinity became the headquarters of a diocese under Bishop Silas. In Shreveport, Greek settlers organized a congregation in 1916 and built St. George Church in 1935, with later arrivals continuing into the 1970s. Also in Shreveport, St. Nicholas Church, established in 1995 as a mission of the Antiochian Archdiocese, traces its history to 1914, when members of the city's Syrian Orthodox community asked Bishop Raphael Hawaweeny to appoint a priest.

In Louisiana today, Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral in New Orleans, which reopened within five months of Hurricane Katrina, is joined by Greek Orthodox parishes in Baton Rouge, Shreveport and Monroe and Antiochian parishes in Shreveport, Lafayette and Westlake. Baton Rouge also has Romanian Orthodox and Orthodox Church in America communities, and other parishes are in Metairie, Houma, Covington, Bush and New Roads.