New Orleans is a delicious blend of the Old and New Worlds. It is hardly surprising that an enterprising, complex people like the Greeks would be attracted to such a place.
Situated near the mouth of the Mississippi River, which drains a vast portion of the North American continent, geography cast a central role for the city in the American drama.
It is often said that New Orleans is America’s most European city, yet it is also declaratively American, Southern, Latin, and African.
It has a vast, dense, troubled, complicated history readily recalling the Old Continent. In a country where much is new, homogenized, and corporatized, here it is rich and sedimented, a center of commerce, cuisine, culture, and music.
The first Orthodox Church in the United States* was established here in 1864 and built in 1866 by Greek merchants and other Orthodox New Orleans inhabitants. The church served an eclectic congregation of Greeks, Syrians, Serbians and other Slavic Orthodox city dwellers.
The First Greeks in New Orleans
I am driving to New Orleans’ “new” Greek Orthodox Church with Magdalene (Maggie) Spirros Maag. Maggie is the head of the Holy Trinity Archives Committee and my primary host for my recent visit. Rather than stopping at the church, she continued towards a bayou leading to Lake Ponchartrain.
Her goal was to start the story of Greeks in New Orleans from the first Greek inhabitants. The first confirmed New Orleans Greek, Miguel Dragon (Drague, Dragos, Draggonas), a “citizen of the Venetian islands” landed here in the late 1700s, where today there are remnants of an old fort. “Interesting how the Greek Orthodox Church made its way back to the site of the first Greek arrivals,” Maggie commented.
This Miguel Dragon had a daughter who married a Hydriot named Andrea Dimitry in 1799, who is counted as the third Greek in New Orleans. The Dimitry family subsequently became prominent in New Orleans commerce and government. Andrea Dimitry fought with US General Andrew Jackson against the British in the Battle of New Orleans. These were the first Greeks, and they arrived before New Orleans became part of the United States.
The original Holy Trinity Church was modest in size, a clapboard wooden edifice with Greek columns in front and a peaked roof adorned with a simple cross. Like so many Orthodox Churches in the Diaspora, Holy Trinity assimilated local ecclesiastical architectural norms. The church had a remarkable architectural similarity with Southern churches of that era.
This small church presided over an Orthodox community primarily Greek but consciously cosmopolitan even as nationalism was growing both in the Diasporas and in the mother countries fitfully emerging from Ottoman rule. This community was in constant contact with other Greek communities in Europe and the Mediterranean, connected by business, family, and regional ties, as well as the active thirst for opportunity.
Connection with Egypt
New Orleans cotton merchants channeled their expertise and capital into Egyptian cotton via the port of Alexandria and quickly Greeks, often from the same merchant houses in New Orleans, controlled a large portion of Egypt’s booming cotton trade. The first cotton gins were brought to Egypt by Greeks.
Though well established in the New Orleans business community by the 1860s, many Greeks left for other Diaspora locations due to the disruptions of the American Civil War (1861-1865), particularly Alexandria.
The community remained small and decidedly multi-ethnic, and the tenure of Bulgarian-born Father Misael, who came from the multiethnic city of Plovdiv (known in Greek as Philipoupolis), kept the community going despite the death of key benefactors, such as Benachi.
In the Holy Trinity Archives, I found some of Father Misael’s books, written in a Bulgarian that had not yet been standardized in its own form of the Cyrillic alphabet, published either in Vienna or in the Mount Athos Monastery of Zografou. To hold such history in one’s hands, a book that predated Bulgarian independence, was a heady experience indeed.
Oh, yes, the books.
The archive saved by generations of congregants through several moves and the devastating Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and lovingly kept by Maggie and the Holy Trinity Archives Committee, included a trove of books, such as a Greek liturgical book published by San Giorgio de Greci publishing house in Venice, Italy. I was reading a book used by the oldest church in America, published by the oldest church in the Diaspora. I have had the pleasure of visiting this church in Venice.
Another was a grammar book written by a Greek philologist in Smyrna and published in Vienna in 1817. I also know the Greek Orthodox Church in Vienna, and I am pretty sure I have visited the building where this book was published. Then there were the merchant books, such as De Bow’s Commercial Review, published in 1847, listing the ships coming and going to various ports, with notations made by Nicholas Benachi.
New Orleans’ deep Greek heritage
New Orleans’ deep Greek heritage is a legacy worn comfortably by today’s New Orleans Greeks. Most of the Greek community descend from that more recent mass immigration of the late 1800s and early 1900s, like most Greek Americans of today.
However, as a key seaport, there are plenty of sailors’ descendants among the community, including an active Chiot population which arrived post World War Two, readily recalling the enterprise of their fellow islanders, the Rallis and Benachis.
There is an elegance and gentility to the community that is perhaps a legacy of this long heritage. It reminds me a great deal of old Greek Diaspora communities in Europe.
They are heirs not only to the oldest Greek community but to one that was part of an organically linked Greek shipping and commercial diaspora, one built on skills, guts, regional and family loyalty, combined with a spirit of cosmopolitanism and mutual aid.
These skills have made Greeks the world largest shipping nation and have figured prominently in the general success of Greeks abroad. We would do well to keep this history close at hand, for the lessons of the past both inspire and offer guidance to our present and future successes.
Originally published April 9, 2022, at The Greek Reporter.
*Editor’s note: Russian Orthodox missionaries had established in Alaska an Orthodox mission in Kodiak Island by 1794 and constructed an Orthodox cathedral in Sitka by 1848, giving Alaska the rightful place as home to North America’s first Orthodox mission and cathedral. But since the Russian Empire didn’t sell the territory of Alaska to the US until 1867 (at which time it became the US Department of Alaska and was under the military command of US Gen. Jefferson C. Davis who thusly pillaged the cathedral and surrounding homes and businesses) and Alaska didn’t even become a state until 1959, the “first Orthodox parish in the US” designation stands for the historic and hospitable Southern city of New Orleans.
