Orthodox Churches in New Mexico

The Orthodox History website's state-by-state list of first parishes names a Greek parish in Albuquerque, founded in 1944, as New Mexico's first. Decades earlier, explosions in 1913 and 1923 killed 263 and 123 men at Dawson, a former coal town in Colfax County. Many of the dead were recent immigrants from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, and with no Orthodox church in town they were buried without an Orthodox funeral service. Dawson's first coal mine opened in 1901, and Phelps Dodge, which bought the coal land in 1906, built a company town there. After mining operations were shut down in 1950, the buildings were razed or relocated, and only the cemetery is now accessible to visitors.

In early 1990 Bishop Kallistos of the Greek Orthodox Diocese of Denver designated St. Elias the Prophet in Santa Fe a mission parish. The parish describes its church, at 7,090 feet, as the highest-altitude Greek Orthodox church in the United States. Services there are held in Greek, English, Spanish, Arabic, Slavonic and Romanian. In the mid-1990s a St. Elias parishioner organized an outing to the Dawson cemetery for a memorial service, and visits there have since become a parish tradition.

Holy Trinity Orthodox Church in Santa Fe was established in 1996 by newly chrismated Orthodox Christians led by Father John Bethancourt. Greek Orthodox, Antiochian, Orthodox Church in America and Ukrainian Orthodox parishes are present, clustered in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, with parishes also in Los Alamos, Clovis and Mesilla Park.