Orthodox Churches in Utah

Orthodox Christianity came to Utah with immigrant railroad and mine workers. Many Greeks came because Leonidas Skliris, a Greek American labor agent, found them railroad jobs. By 1912, more than 4,000 Greek immigrants worked in Salt Lake County mines and railroads. On January 22, 1905, over 200 people met in Salt Lake City to organize a parish, and Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church was dedicated on October 29. It also served Serbians, Russians and Christian Albanians. The parish calls it the oldest Greek Orthodox parish between St. Louis and San Francisco.

Coal mining drew young Greek men to Carbon County, where Assumption Greek Orthodox Church in Price was dedicated on August 15, 1916. A monument at Holy Trinity honors fifty Greek immigrants killed in the 1924 Castle Gate mine explosion. In the Ogden area, where families sometimes drove to Holy Trinity for Easter services, Transfiguration Greek Orthodox Church in South Ogden first celebrated the Divine Liturgy in its new church in October 1964.

Archbishop Iakovos elevated Holy Trinity to a cathedral in April 1968, and the church was placed on the state and national registers in 1975. The parish added a second church, Prophet Elias in Holladay, in 1969. Serbian settlers in Midvale founded a parish in the early 1900s, since dissolved; after new immigration from the former Yugoslavia, the Serbian Orthodox parish in Salt Lake City was re-established in 1997. Saint George Russian Orthodox Church in West Jordan, a parish founded in 2005, consecrated its first building in 2014.