New Orleans: America’s First Greektown, and a Hub of the Greek Commercial Diaspora

by | Jan 6, 2025 | Featured News, Greek Diaspora, NP Exclusive

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When discussing “firsts” for Greeks in the United States, which is home to the second largest Greek population in the world, our minds generally shift to New York or maybe Chicago or Boston. The truth is, nearly all the Greek American “firsts” happened in the American South, including the first “Greektown.”

Not far from Tarpon Springs, Florida, which is a seaside town with a large Greek population and a vibe declaratively Greek, there is Clearwater Beach, and a statue of Theodor Griego, a sailor on a Spanish ship, said to be the first Greek to set foot in what would become the United States, in 1540. On the other side of Florida is New Smyrna, where several hundred Greeks, Italians, and Spaniards formed a short-lived colony under British control in the 1760s.

Greeks had been migrating to the United States in very small numbers in the late 1700s and 1800s, and records in my home island of Hydra indicate that our intrepid Hydriot ships paid calls to American ports such as Boston and New York in the early years of the American Republic. Certainly, Americans were inspired by the Greek War of Independence which was itself inspired by the American Revolution, and some Greeks, particularly war orphans, came to the country in the 1830s and 1840s. New York and Boston gathered most of them, but they lacked the critical mass of a community.

The first Greek in New Orleans is said to be Michael Dragon, purportedly a native of Athens, who came to the city in the 1760s, while the river port was under Spanish rule. The second Greek arrival in 1798 was a native of Hydra, Andreas Dritsakos, known as Andrea Dimitry, who married Dragon’s daughter. It was in the 1840s that “Greek New Orleans” began, as scions of major Greek, primarily Chios, commercial houses established a presence there. New Orleans was America’s premier cotton port, supported by a vicious, financialized slave system. The cotton trade was booming in this era and Greek firms played a major, though largely low-key, role in movement of vital commodities like cotton and grain. For instance, the Russian grain trade out of the Ukrainian port of Odessa was largely brokered by Greek merchants and carried in the hulls of Greek ships. New York, another trans-shipment point, also began to gather Greek merchants.

The Greek presence in New Orleans by the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 included several hundred people, not just wealthy Chios cotton merchants like Benachi, Ralli, Agelasto, but also sailors and artisans. There were also other Orthodox, particularly Serbs from Dalmatia, Russians, and Syrian Orthodox, and all were interested in forming a church community. The outbreak of the American Civil War blunted the community’s growth, as most merchants were involved in the export of cotton, primarily to fellow Greek merchants in New York, Britain, and France.

Many merchants quit New Orleans during the Civil War and worked with their kin and colleagues in boosting cotton production in Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, and India, building an alternative cotton supply chain. Others remained in New Orleans, many fought for the South, and Nicholas Benachi, an important Chios merchant, became Greek consul in 1864. In 1866 Benachi, along with another Greek merchant and a Serbian café owner, established Holy Trinity Orthodox Church, the first Orthodox Church in the United States. New York would wait almost thirty years to establish a church, in 1892.

The Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in New Orleans, Louisiana. Circa 1910

Holy Trinity looked a lot like other churches in the South, a white clapboard wooden building looking like a Greek temple with a cross on it. It would be replaced in later years with a brick building and a double belfry, not dissimilar to dozens of other Orthodox or Catholic churches in the United States. To walk in its tree-lined shadow is to soak up the oldest chronological footprint of Orthodoxy in America, in what was an Orthodox neighborhood.

In some ways, the Holy Trinity community in its early days resembled Orthodox communities set up by Greek and Serbian merchants in western Europe during the 1700s and 1800s—small, asymmetrically wealthy and powerful merchant and intellectual communities with considerable yet understated clout. Often, like New Orleans’ Greek community, they would begin as multiethnic Orthodox communities. Vienna, Trieste, Marseilles, Liverpool were all important commercial and intellectual hubs of the Greek world, and New Orleans formed a spoke in this network. The age of mass immigration of Balkan and Southern European immigrants to America had not yet begun. But it was coming.

New Orleans’ community in the later 1800s was small and remained, like some communities in Europe, multiethnic, with alternate services in Slavonic and Syriac as well as Greek, maintained by merchants and humbler folk. The church and rectory, on Dorgenois Street, became a “Greektown,” with Greek, Serbian, and Syrian families concentrating around the church, whether poorer homes or the colonnaded mansions of the Benachi or Agelasto families on Esplanade Avenue, all a short walk from the church. When the mass migration of Greeks began in the early 1900s, the New Orleans Greektown received further infusions of Greeks and given the city’s role as the Mississippi River’s exit, plenty of Greek sailors, then and now. This Greektown remained until the 1960s, as suburbanization and white flight brought the Greeks and their church into the suburbs.

While often not thought of as such, America’s first Greektown was in New Orleans. Like future Greektowns in America, Greeks and other Orthodox congregated near the church. This pattern would be repeated in dozens of cities from the 1890s, as the small trickle of Greeks became a flood. In such a way, New Orleans represents the start of Greek American history and is part of a typical Greek American story shared with other communities prior to the onset of greater assimilation and suburbanization.

However, New Orleans is a unique community in the Greek American story, as the original community represents an older, less numerous, and highly cosmopolitan community of empowered, educated merchants with global connections. New Orleans was part of a highly successful and active Greek network that stood at the front lines of the global economy, while never forgetting their origins. This is the Diaspora that liberated modern Greece, while navigating the politics and economics of the onset of global capitalism with the same skills as piloting their ships. This commercial diaspora also eventually funded and merged with the Greek merchant marine, still the world’s largest for over fifty years.

New Orleans’ Greektown was the first, and it encodes a fascinating, appropriately global, Greek narrative.

 

 

Alexander Billinis is a lecturer at Clemson University in the Honors College and Political Science Department. He has worked in various capacities and geographies in international banking, law, real estate, and journalism. A dual citizen of the US and Greece, he and his family have lived and worked in the US, UK, Greece, and Serbia. 

 

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