Orthodox Churches in Vermont

A 2009 survey of first parishes by state lists a Russian parish in Springfield, dated 1906, as Vermont's first. The Orthodox Church in America (OCA) dates Holy Trinity Church there to 1905, when St. Alexander Hotovitsky, a priest-martyr, founded it, and says it was also the site of a Russian Orthodox orphanage in the early twentieth century. Kept alive for decades by a group of faithful parishioners, Holy Trinity underwent spiritual and liturgical renewal in the 1970s and 1980s.

In Burlington, families from Greece and the former Christian lands of the Ottoman Empire held baptisms, weddings and the Divine Liturgy in homes from 1905. The first priest to serve them regularly commuted from a Greek Orthodox parish across the Canadian border. After decades at an Episcopal church that offered its facilities, the parish moved in 1958 to a chapel built in 1914 and donated to the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont, and bought it in 1961. Archbishop Iakovos presided at its official opening as Dormition of the Mother of God on May 29, 1966.

Today the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America has parishes in Burlington and Rutland, and the OCA has parishes in Springfield and Northfield. The Burlington parish reports members from many Mediterranean and Eastern European backgrounds, as well as American-born converts. The Northfield church, St. Jacob of Alaska, began in September 1994 as a mission outreach of Holy Trinity and belongs, like it, to the OCA's Diocese of New England.