Orthodox Churches in Oregon

Russian Orthodoxy in Oregon traces its history to the Alaska mission of the 1790s, and Orthodox immigrants arrived in the late nineteenth century. In 1892 Fr. Sebastian Dabovich baptized two Greek children in Portland, a ceremony the Oregonian called the first of its kind in the city. Lavrenty Chernov, an Alaskan laborer, built a wooden Holy Trinity chapel on East 20th Street. Dedicated in 1895, it served Russians, Syrians and Serbs, and the city later ordered it demolished. Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, which dates its founding to 1907, completed its stone church in 1910.

In the mid-1960s Russian Old Believers, descendants of Russians who rejected Patriarch Nikon's seventeenth-century church reforms, began settling in the Willamette Valley. Some came from China by way of Brazil; in 1968 and 1969 about twenty-two families from Turkey built a village between Woodburn and Gervais, where Old Rite congregations continue. The settlers were priestless and worshiped in prayer halls led by an elected pastor; churches with priests followed in the 1980s.

In Portland, Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral was elevated to Cathedral of the Pacific Northwest in 2007. St. Nicholas, founded as a Russian parish in 1927, began using English after the Orthodox Church in America gained autocephaly in 1970. Holy Nativity of the Theotokos Genuine Orthodox Cathedral follows the old Julian calendar under the Genuine Orthodox Christian Church of Greece, and New Martyrs of Russia in Mulino belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.