Orthodox Churches in Maine

Maine's first Orthodox parish was Greek: St. Demetrios, established in 1909 and incorporated in 1914 as the Greek Orthodox Community, Biddeford and Saco. Holy Trinity in Lewiston followed in 1910, founded for more than 3,000 Greeks drawn by jobs in the Bates and surrounding mills. After the mills began closing in the 1950s, Greek residents moved south to the Massachusetts mills. Holy Trinity had 135 families in 1967 and built a new church on Hogan Road in 1977.

In the Kennebec Valley, Richmond became a center for Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and other Orthodox Slavs displaced by the Bolshevik Revolution and World War II. A retirement colony there, established in the early 1950s by Baron Vladimir Kuhn von Poushental, had upwards of 400 refugees at its peak, and the town had three Russian Orthodox churches by the 1960s. St. Alexander Nevsky, which dates from 1953, belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and holds services in English and Church Slavonic for a congregation that includes many Americans baptized into Orthodoxy.

A Serbian Orthodox community that came together in southern Maine in 1999 bought the Biddeford church formerly known as St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church and kept the name St. Demetrios. The Greek parish moved to a new church in Saco in 2000. At Holy Trinity in Lewiston, a priest assigned in December 2001 established an outreach program for the Pan-Orthodox community within a 50-mile radius. From 2000 to 2008 Holy Trinity expanded its membership by fifty families.