If you’ve driven the inner belt through Cleveland, you’ve seen it. You just didn’t stop.
Coming off I-90 onto the West 14th ramp the road bends, and there it is. Three domes and a row of gold crosses, sitting maybe a stone’s throw off the off-ramp like the highway department drew the merge lane around it and kept going. Most people clock it for half a second at sixty and never think about it again. Tens of thousands of cars a day. A church older than the road, parked at the road’s front door.
That’s Annunciation Greek Orthodox, 2187 West 14th. The first Greek church in Cleveland, and for eighteen years the only one.
Get a drone up over it and you see what the drivers never do. The domes are gold, a cross standing on each. The yellow brick towers wedged in tight against the inner belt, and past all of it, flat on the horizon, Lake Erie.
The Greeks didn’t start on this side of the river. The first ones showed up in the 1890s and packed into a few blocks downtown off Bolivar Road, a stretch they called Greek Town, between Ontario and East 9th. Coffeehouses. Rented rooms. When a priest passed through he’d say the liturgy wherever there was space, somebody’s apartment, or up the hill at St. Theodosius, the Russian church with the onion domes you’ve seen in The Deer Hunter. For a while the only regular clergy they had was Father George Scarpas, who rode the train in from Pittsburgh once a month and rode it back.
The first real Greek Orthodox service in Cleveland had a roof over it and a movie screen under it. Christmas Eve, in a hall above a theater at Ontario and Bolivar. That’s where it started. Above a movie house.
By 1912 the congregation had organized itself as the Pan-Hellenic Union and scraped together $12,000. Fifteen families. They crossed the river and bought two mansions on West 14th, then called Jennings Avenue, that had belonged to a pair of industrialists named Lamson and a partner named Sessions. Cleveland money, the kind of names that ended up bolted to factory walls. The Greeks tore the mansions down and started building a church on the lot.
They incorporated in February 1913. The building wasn’t done for years. They held the liturgy in it anyway, unfinished, starting in 1919. Weddings and funerals were still happening in people’s living rooms into the 1930s because the church couldn’t hold them yet.
Then the icons.
In 1924 a priest named John Zografos took over the parish. He stayed four years. In those four years he painted every icon in the building. All 85 of them. The Christ in the dome, the saints down the walls, the screen standing between the people and the altar, every one of them came off the brush of one man who was also running the parish and starting the first Greek school in the city. They’re still up there. Walk in today and you’re looking at one man’s four years of work, a century later, nobody having to repaint it.
That’s the part that gets me. In the Orthodox way of seeing it, an icon is a window. You look at the saint and the saint looks back. You don’t sign one the way a painter signs a canvas. Zografos spent four years putting those faces on the walls so people could look through them to whatever’s on the other side. He died, the priests after him died, and the windows stayed open.
The neighborhood around the church came apart. By the 1960s the old estates on West 14th were gone and the state ran Interstate 90 straight through Tremont. The freeway split the neighborhood and dumped an on-ramp at the church’s front step. The money moved to the suburbs. SS. Constantine and Helen went up in Cleveland Heights, St. Demetrios out in Rocky River. Both trace back to this one corner. The parish on West 14th stayed put. Back in the thirties the mortgage nearly went under, and a man named Antony Hoty stepped in and pulled it off the foreclosure block. They kept the doors open through all of it. That’s why they still call it the Mother Church, the one every Greek parish in town descends from.
There’s something fitting in the name. The Annunciation is March 25, the morning the angel Gabriel tells Mary she’s going to carry Christ. It’s the hinge the whole story turns on, the very start of it. They named the first Greek church in Cleveland after a beginning, and it became the root the rest grew out of.
For most of a hundred years the view out the front door was an on-ramp and not much else. That’s finally turning. Cleveland Metroparks is putting a four-acre park on the ground in front of the church, tied into the new bridge work down by the river. Grass and trees where there’s been concrete and merge lanes since Eisenhower was president. And every Memorial Day weekend the lot fills for the Tremont Greek Fest, lamb off the spit and loukoumades fried to order and a line out the door, the one weekend a year the rest of Cleveland walks through the doors instead of glancing at the roof from the highway.
Next time you come off the belt and the road bends toward West 14th, give it the half second you’ve got. Look up. Fifteen families. Twelve thousand dollars. One priest with a paintbrush and four years on the scaffold. It’s all still up there, holding the same corner it held before the road existed, and it isn’t going anywhere the freeway can put it.
