St. George church to celebrate 75 years

BANGOR – The city’s first Greek immigrant, George N. Brountas, was so starved for his native language and Orthodox faith that he imported family, friends and a visiting priest to the Queen City.

Brountas, who arrived in 1897, was the first Greek Orthodox immigrant to settle in Bangor. Members of the Skoufis and Zoidis families quickly followed. Their children and grandchildren helped shape Bangor over the next century.

Construction of a church began in November 1929, when one of the founders convinced a man digging a foundation for a house on Sanford Street to dig a foundation for the church nearby, when the congregation had just $23 in its coffers.

This weekend, St. George Greek Orthodox Church will celebrate its 75th anniversary. More than 120 former church members who have moved from the Bangor area are expected to join the 70 families that make up the congregation today.

The church is one of four Greek Orthodox churches in Maine. The other churches are in Portland, Lewiston and Saco.

Metropolitan Methodios of Boston, the highest-ranking church official in New England, will lead worship services on Saturday and Sunday.

Maria Brountas, whose husband, Arthur Brountas, is a descendent of St. George’s founder, has been compiling the church’s history since she moved to Bangor 50 years ago. She first put together a book of photos and a church history for the 50th anniversary book in 1980.

This year, however, she asked people who had grown up in the church to write personal memoirs.

“When I first started this, I was able to talk with the founders, most of whom spoke Greek to me,” Maria Brountas said earlier this week. “It was wonderful because I got to see the way they felt about the church and hear the passion in their voices.”

She said that in amassing the history and the new anniversary book, she learned that a woman church member collected money for the pews from other female parishioners 25 cents at time. Sometimes the woman had to return to go back several times before the women were able to pay their monthly 25-cent tithe, Maria Brountas said. They paid for the icons in the church in a similar fashion.

As the only Eastern Orthodox church in northern Maine, St. George’s has come to serve a more diverse ethnic community over the years, according to the Rev. Adam Metropolis, who has led the church since 2001. Today, the congregation includes Russians, Serbians, Ukranians, Bulgarians, Albanians and other Eastern Orthodox worshippers.

Because it always has been a small congregation, the church has held a high-profile

fundraiser in the community for most of its 75 years. St. George’s Greek Ball once was a high point in the Bangor social season. For the past three years, however, the church has raised most of its annual budget from the Greek food sold at a booth at the annual Folk Festival in Bangor.

Lee Speronis, the managing partner of Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse in Bangor, coordinated the fundraiser last weekend at The American Folk Festival on the Bangor Waterfront. A member of the church for only two years, he and his family are viewed by the Brountas generation as the people who will keep St. George’s vital for the next 25 or 50 years.

That torch has been passed before. At the church’s mortgage burning ceremony in 1943, Reginald Wright Kauffman urged the younger members of the congregation to carry on the work of their parents. He also gave those attending the service a history of Orthodoxy in North America.

His remarks, reprinted in the book published to mark the church’s 50th anniversary in 1980, are timely still. “Most persons think that Orthodoxy is something as new in America as it is old elsewhere,” he said. “Orthodoxy is the oldest of all the Christian Churches – and was by no means the last to come to America. As a matter of fact, Orthodoxy came to the American Continent in the middle of the 1700s, when the Russians brought it to Alaska.”

Weekend activities include golfing, a Penobscot River cruise, a banquet and special services at 4:30 p.m. Saturday and 9 a.m. Sunday at the church. For information, call the church at 945-9588.