ABSTRACT
GREEK COMMUNITIES More than one million Americans in the United States today claim Greek heritage. In the eighteenth century, a number of Greek sailors, adventurers, and merchants settled in cities throughout the colonies, and later, the independent United States. A notable Greek community in St. Augustine, Florida, for example, traces its roots to a group of about five hundred Greeks who came in 1768 to work as indentured colonists on a British plantation in New Smyrna, Florida. Their heritage is commemorated at the St. Photios National Shrine. In New Orleans, Greek residents founded the first Greek Orthodox Church in the Americas in 1864. Greeks began to settle in New York City and Chicago in small numbers during the midnineteenth century, but a major wave during the late nineteenth century established “Greektowns” in several major cities.
