Roseland’s $16M Greek Orthodox church complex nears Completion
21/5/2011
ROSELAND — With the placement and unveiling of a 9-foot Justinian cross atop a gold cupola in Roseland today, the state’s oldest Greek Orthodox congregation and its third-oldest in a sense became its newest.
Although the two churches — St. Nicholas from Newark’s Central Ward and Sts. Constantine and Helen from Orange — officially merged about six years ago, today’s ceremony marked a symbolic but still significant beginning, said Stephanie Antell.
“It’s a spiritual baptism,” said Antell, who attended the event with about 150 others, including Metropolitan Bishop Evangelos Kourounis, her father, James Dalianis, a member of the church’s committee, and her mother, Elaine. “It shows a new unity.”
Antell, who was baptized at St. Nicholas, spoke a few minutes after the Rev. Seraphim Poulos, raised to just above the cupola via a boom lift, tugged on a cloth to reveal the 350-pound, gold-leafed cross.
“It was a building before,” said Gus Theodos, who was president of St. Nicholas from 1995 to 2005. “With a cross on it, it’s now a church.”
But with winter’s heavy snows having slowed the construction of Sts. Nicholas, Constantine and Helen, services will still be held at the church in Orange for a few more months.
The exterior of the $16 million complex — the church, its administrative and school wing, and the social and recreational annex — is nearly finished. The interior, though, is a nearly empty shell, said Dalianis.
The 561-member congregation also needs to raise another roughly $4 million to pay for the project.
James Sumas, who has made a substantial financial contribution to the building of the new church, is nevertheless looking forward to a late summer opening.
“My father built the old one,” he said of Nicholas Sumas, who was among four who helped finance the building of the Orange church, which was built in 1956, four decades after the Sts. Constantine and Helen congregation formed.
“I thought I was obligated to keep his presence there, and I’m sure he would be very happy with the new church,” Sumas said.
St. Nicholas’ congregation, the state’s oldest among what are now 23 Greek Orthodox congregations, came together in 1901. Its church, on what was then High Street, now Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, was completed in 1924.
Although Newark’s Greek population peaked at about 8,000 in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Hellenic influence exceeded those numbers. It’s been estimated, for example, that about two-thirds of downtown Newark’s restaurants during the surrounding decades were run by Greeks.
And even as they left town in the late 1960s, drawn as much away from the city as toward the suburbs, they returned each Sunday.
“Greek people are funny,” Theodos, the former president of St. Nicholas, said. “Greeks stay in the church they were baptized in, even if they moved away, they would come back.”
But by the late 1990s, just a few dozen parishioners were attending services in Newark, said Theodos, who served as co-president with Sumas of the merged congregation for two years.
“We had to move to preserve the church,” he said. “People were moving away. And the church has got to go to the people.”
