Orthodox Christian dating in Alaska

Orthodox Christians in Alaska

Anchorage first, because the diocese's own cathedral page calls it the hub. St Innocent Orthodox Cathedral on Turpin Street was consecrated in 1994 as the Bicentennial Cathedral of the Orthodox Church in America, commemorating the arrival of the first missionaries in 1794; in its short history it has seen the canonisation of St Yakov Netsvetov and hosted visiting hierarchs, and its membership, the page says, takes in Russians, Greeks, transplants from the lower forty-eight and Native Alaskans of Aleut, Alutiiq, Yup'ik, Athabascan and Tlingit descent. St Tikhon of Moscow is on the Old Seward Highway in the south of the city; the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of San Francisco's Holy Transfiguration is on O'Malley Road; and the Protecting Veil of the Theotokos Orthodox Community, listed among the Church's monastic communities, is in Anchorage too. North in the Mat-Su Valley, St Juvenaly and His Companion in Wasilla was founded in 2011 as a pan-Alaskan parish, serving mostly in English with Slavonic, Unangam Tunuu, Yup'ik and Tlingit for its Native parishioners; it absorbed the congregation of St Nicholas at Eklutna, where Chief Wasilla had moved the old church of the Dena'ina in 1897 and where no active congregation remains, only the historic church and its restoration.

Then the Kenai and Kodiak, the oldest ground. Holy Assumption of the Virgin Mary on Mission Avenue in Kenai has kept its own chronicle: Hieromonk Nikolai Militov, who came to Sitka with Bishop Innocent in 1840, established the parish in 1845, the first church went up in 1849, the reader Makary Ivanov rode the peninsula from 1860 inoculating the Dena'ina against smallpox, and Fr Nikolai died in 1867, the year Alaska was sold. Across Shelikof Strait, Holy Resurrection Cathedral in Kodiak descends from the parish of 1794, was raised to a cathedral in 2001 by Bishop Nikolai, stands in a fourth church built in the 1940s after a fire, and keeps St Herman's relics under a lamp that Patriarch Alexy II gave in 1993; the village of Ouzinkie across the water is the community St Herman left Kodiak to serve, and its parish of the Nativity has kept a hundred and fifty years.

The Southeast is Sitka and Juneau. St Michael the Archangel Cathedral on Lincoln Street in Sitka, designed by St Innocent and built of spruce logs by Finnish carpenters between 1844 and 1848, was the see of the Russian diocese that governed all North America from 1840 to 1872 and of the Diocese of Alaska after it; it burned to the ground on 2 January 1966 and was rebuilt, with more than ninety-five percent of its icons and objects saved. St Nicholas on Fifth Street in Juneau, octagonal, paid for with money from Russia and painted with panels from Russia, has been a Native Alaskan, mostly Tlingit, parish since 1893, founded after Tlingit leaders invited the Orthodox bishop to instruct and baptise them when the American missionaries of the gold-rush town would not allow Tlingit in their services or schools.

The rest is the map of the diocese: St Herman in Fairbanks, where the first Liturgy was served in the early seventies at St Matthew's Episcopal Church and the first resident priest, Archpriest Michael Oleksa, came in September 1983; St Sophia on Manignaq Street in Bethel, at the head of the Bethel and Kuskokwim deanery's string of village parishes; St Seraphim of Sarov in Dillingham on Bristol Bay; St Michael in Cordova, founded in 1925; the Transfiguration at Ninilchik; and Holy Ascension in Unalaska, whose page tells of the octagonal first chapel of 1808 and of the furs local residents gave the company to pay for icons and candelabra.

The people filling the parishes have been counted. The Orthodox Studies Institute surveyed twenty American parishes across six jurisdictions and reported, of the converts received since 2013, that two thirds were under forty at their reception, that people in their thirties outnumbered every other decade, and that 44 percent were single when they came in.

Alaska was not among the twenty, and the survey is not Alaska's story: here the Church is not a convert church but a Native one, two centuries old, and the person at the coffee hour in Bethel or Kodiak was baptised as a child in a village parish. Anchorage and Fairbanks are where the two Alaskas meet, the transplants from the lower forty-eight the cathedral lists among its members and the Yup'ik and Aleut families who moved to the city for work, and the pan-Alaskan mission in Wasilla was founded for exactly that meeting.

One jurisdiction covers nearly the whole state on this page. The Orthodox Church in America's Diocese of Sitka and Alaska has the cathedrals of Anchorage, Kodiak, Sitka and Unalaska, the parishes of Kenai, Juneau, Fairbanks, Bethel, Dillingham and Cordova, the mission in Wasilla and ninety-three communities in all, most of them villages reachable only by air or water. The Greek Orthodox Metropolis of San Francisco has Holy Transfiguration in Anchorage. Whether the Antiochian archdiocese or the Russian Church Abroad keep a parish in the state was not checked for this page.

Where the community gathers

Alaska's Orthodox gather in Anchorage and the Mat-Su, on the Kenai and Kodiak, in the Southeast, and across the interior, the west and the Aleutians.

Distances that decide everything

The Orthodox year in Alaska

Dating across jurisdictions, and with converts

Two miles separate the two jurisdictions in Anchorage, and a flight separates Anchorage from almost everywhere else on this page. The cana.love form was written with those distances in mind, and it can be counted on the fingers.

Meeting safely

• No one you have not met in person gets money from you; on cana.love the asking is grounds for a report, and the asker is removed for good.
• A first meeting happens somewhere public, with a friend told where you are, and the conversation stays on the site until you, and not the other person, decide to move it.

The guidelines page explains reviews, reports and appeals.

Common questions