![]() Those architectural enhancements “may have been made with the best of intentions” for a shrine of such significance, but they pushed the cost far above the archdiocese’s public disclosures, the committee said in 2018. Nicholas cost overruns to expensive change orders. The archdiocese appointed an investigating committee that attributed the St. The archdiocese, which had financial woes of its own, used $3.5 million in funds dedicated to the shrine for its own operating deficit and had to repay it. Officials ceremonially broke ground in 2014.Ĭosts soared beyond projections, and construction halted in late 2017 after the archdiocese fell behind on payments. The archdiocese and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the trade center, ended up in litigation in 2011 before settling on a site on Liberty Street, near the old church. The archdiocese always intended to rebuild, but the question was where, given all the components involved in reconstruction at ground zero. “We never thought that it would take 20 years.” “We kept waiting” to return, Pavlakos said. Since 9/11, parishioners have worshipped at various parishes in the region. By the turn of the century, its small core of members were still coming in from surrounding boroughs and communities to worship. Over the decades, even as the church was islanded by a parking lot and dwarfed by the World Trade Center, parish leaders refused to sell to land-hungry developers. Nicholas was all volunteer,” said Pavlakos. According to parish lore, newly arrived Greek immigrants came there to offer thanks to St. Nicholas on Lower Manhattan’s Cedar Street in 1916, converting a former tavern into a church and topping it with a small belfry and cross. If “they were poor, they needed something to eat, they wanted soup, everybody was accepted.” Nicholas, whether they were Greek, non-Greek, any race, religion, we accepted everybody,” she said. ![]() She was baptized in the old church, where her parents were married and her grandparents worshiped. Nicholas was in the past,” said Olga Pavlakos, vice president of the parish. That inclusiveness “is carrying on what St. “But this beautiful shrine we’re building belongs to New York, it belongs to the U.S., and it belongs to the world.” Nicholas, the private entity overseeing the project in cooperation with the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. “It’s going to have a rich liturgical life” as a church, said Michael Psaros, vice chairman of the Friends of St. In addition to its sanctuary, the shrine will have a separate space for meditation and reflection for people of all faiths. Given its prominent location near the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, the shrine is destined to become a signature American expression of Eastern Orthodoxy, an ancient Christian communion that still predominates in Greece and much of Eastern Europe but has a slender share of the U.S. Through an innovative process, interior lights are being designed to illuminate thin panels of marble, mined from the same Pentelic vein in Greece that sourced the Parthenon, the ancient temple in Athens. The lighting of the church will come from within. “Being able to come and worship at the site of my brother’s death, in a beautiful chapel that not only honors John but all the victims that died that day and is a symbol of this rebirth, is unbelievably important to me now.” Nicholas brings me close to my brother,” Anthoula Katsimatides said. The ceremony will be a milestone in a project long beset with bureaucratic tangles and financial woes but now on track for completion next year. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine, being built to replace the parish church and to honor those who were lost. 10, the eve of the date 20 years after the nation’s deadliest terrorist attack, she’ll attend the ceremonial lighting of St. ![]() John and the other victims were being cradled by St. Nicholas was also lost, we thought that there was some kind of a message there, that the victims did not die alone,” Anthoula Katsimatides said.
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