Orthodox Churches in West Virginia

According to the West Virginia Encyclopedia, Orthodox Christians from Russia, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire began settling in the coalfields of southern West Virginia as early as 1880 and later came to work in northern mines and steel mills. They held prayer services in private homes before building churches and importing priests. St. Mary's Orthodox Church, now in Bluefield, was organized in McDowell County in 1895, and its founders were immigrant coal miners from the Carpathian region. Small parishes founded in Logan and McDowell counties in the early 1900s later disappeared.

St. George Antiochian Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston records that a small group of immigrants gathered for worship in a rented building on Kanawha Street in 1892 and that the parish was officially founded in 1905, when Rev. Michael Husson arrived. The encyclopedia calls St. George the oldest and largest Antiochian presence in the state. In Wheeling, Archimandrite Parthenios Kolonis, a missionary priest from Patmos, addressed Greek Orthodox faithful in November 1913 and named the new church the Revelation of St. John the Divine. In Weirton, Greek immigrants discussed plans for a church in 1915 with J. C. Williams, later president of Weirton Steel.

Holy Cross Monastery in Wayne is an English-speaking men's monastery of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. Hieromonk Kallistos (Pazalos) founded it in Missouri in September 1986, and the brotherhood moved to Wayne on May 25, 2000, after authorities required a highway to be built through the monastery.