Kostis Kourelis

Clemson University

From Greek Revival to Greek America: Archaeology and Transformation in Saint George Orthodox Cathedral of Philadelphia.

When John Haviland completed Saint Andrew's Episcopal Church, one of Philadelphia’s premier Greek Revival projects in 1822, he could have never imagined that living Greeks would eventually inhabit his prized construction and personal mausoleum. Haviland’s design was explicitly based on the most scientific archaeological information of its day. Abandoned by its Episcopalian congregation, the building was purchased by a young Greek-American community in 1921. The appropriation and re-use of pre-existing religious structures was a common strategy in the foundation of Greek Orthodox Churches throughout America. Saint Andrew’s conversion to Saint George’s illuminates archaeology’s cultural currency in the formation of the Greek-American identity during the 1920s, engaging in the discourse of whiteness, historicity and exceptionalism. Conversion into an Orthodox cathedral necessitated interventions that simultaneously preserved the classical purity of the Protestant original, but also satisfied the ritual and iconographic requirements of an older creed. Mosaics, frescoes, woodwork, icons and votives facilitated a subtle transformation. A major phase of artistic patronage coincides with the visit of King George II of Greece in June 1942, a troubled time for an occupied Greece. An archaeological examination of the building’s accumulated layers reveals the creative interaction between past and present, foreign and native in the architectural formation of identity. Less heroic than the modernist churches of the 1960s (inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Annunciation at Milwaukee), the tactical conversion of buildings has received little attention by architectural historians.