On an October weekend in Cherry Hill, the smell of charcoal-grilled lamb drifts across Mercer Street, and a line forms outside a parish hall for plates of pastitsio and trays of honey-soaked baklava. The Greeks in Cherry Hill, New Jersey are not the township’s largest community, but for half a century they have been among its most visible at the table, in the diner booth, and on the festival dance floor. Their story runs from the row houses of South Philadelphia and the diners of Camden to one of the wealthiest suburbs in South Jersey.
The Place
Cherry Hill is a township in Camden County, a suburb of Philadelphia that sits inside the Delaware Valley just across the river from the city. For most of its history it was farmland, part of what was once called Delaware Township until the name was changed in 1961 after the Cherry Hill Mall.
The transformation came fast. Assessed property value climbed from $9.5 million in 1950 to $156.2 million in 1965, by which point Cherry Hill had overtaken Camden to become the wealthiest community in South Jersey. Today roughly 79,000 people live here, the largest municipality in Camden County, with a median household income above $120,000.
It is a town of good schools, leafy subdivisions, and an established Jewish community of Cherry Hill whose synagogues and day schools are among the township’s defining institutions. The Greek presence is smaller and quieter, but it has its own anchor, and the anchor is a church.
How It Became Greek
To understand the Greeks of Cherry Hill, you have to start across the river and a generation earlier, in Philadelphia and Camden, where Greek immigrants first put down roots and then, like so many before them, moved out to the suburbs once they could. The pattern echoed that of other immigrant enclaves nearby, including the Italians of South Philadelphia, whose own old neighbourhood overlapped with the first Greek arrivals.
From the islands to the city
Greeks arrived in the Philadelphia region in two great waves. The first came between the 1890s and the 1920s, part of the nearly 400,000 Greeks who entered the United States in those years. They came from specific homelands, and they organised their American lives around them: the islands of Chios and Ikaria, the region of Epirus, Macedonia, the Peloponnese, Cyprus, and the Pontus on the Black Sea coast.
The first community gathered in Center City Philadelphia, around Locust and Tenth Streets. The Annunciation church, Evangelismos, was founded in 1908 on South Twelfth Street, and St. George followed in 1921 on South Eighth Street, later becoming a cathedral, according to the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. A second wave arrived after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened the door again. The same trade and faith that shaped Greek life here also built communities like the Greeks of Port Washington, New York and the Greeks of Oak Brook, Illinois.
The diner ladder
With English a barrier and few doors open, Greeks gravitated toward the food trade, work that needed strong hands more than fluent speech. The pattern repeated thousands of times: a man started washing dishes, became a cook, then a chef, then saved enough to buy the place outright.
South Jersey filled with the result. From the 1950s through the mid-1960s, dozens of new diners opened across Camden County, a great many of them Greek-owned. The Olga’s diners in Camden and Marlton belonged to the Stavros family, the Elgin Diner in Camden to the Valianos family, the Penn Queen in Pennsauken to the Katsikas, Lavdas, and Kontorousis families. In Cherry Hill itself, the Windsor Diner was run by the Mastoris and Mamas families, and the Ponzio’s name became practically a synonym for the township.
Building a parish in Camden
As Greek families spread through Camden and its suburbs, they needed a church of their own. The pioneers of the South Jersey community first established the American Hellenic Orthodox Center in Camden, a building that housed AHEPA and a Greek school for some fifty years. It was the seed of everything that followed.
St. Thomas Greek Orthodox Church was established in 1966, and the present church on Mercer Street in Cherry Hill was built in 1967. The move mirrored the wider migration of Greater Philadelphia’s Greeks, who by the post-war decades were leaving the old city neighbourhoods for Upper Darby, Broomall, Valley Forge, and across the river to Cherry Hill and Vineland. The same upward climb that built Greek diner fortunes carried Greek families into the suburbs, and they brought their faith with them.
The church becomes a campus
Once planted, St. Thomas kept growing. The parish opened a cultural centre, now named the Danielle Kousoulis Cultural Center, attached to the church in 1977. The John Balis Educational Building followed in 2006, today home to what the parish describes as the largest Greek school in the Metropolis of New Jersey. A senior housing centre opened in 2016. Across half a century the community went from a borrowed hall in Camden to a multi-building campus in one of the region’s wealthiest towns.
The Landmarks
St. Thomas Greek Orthodox Church, 615 Mercer Street. The heart of Greek Cherry Hill, established in 1966 with the present church built the following year. It falls under the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of New Jersey and runs a Greek school, Sunday school, the GOYA youth ministry, AHEPA, and the Philoptochos women’s society.
The Greek Agora Festival, 615 Mercer Street. The parish’s annual festival, held each autumn since the 1970s, is billed as the largest Greek food and wine festival in the Delaware Valley. It has been ranked among the best Greek festivals in the country, drawing record crowds for lamb platters, gyros, folk dancing taught by parishioners, and homemade baklava.
Ponzio’s Diner-Bakery-Bar, 7 West Route 70. A South Jersey institution since 1964, when brothers Mike and Nick Fifis, who had come down from Flemington, bought the old Ellisburg Diner and renamed it. It has sat at the corner of Route 70 and Kings Highway for five decades, the kind of Greek-owned diner that taught the region what a diner could be.
The Danielle Kousoulis Cultural Center, 615 Mercer Street. Attached to St. Thomas since 1977, the hall hosts the dances, dinners, and gatherings that keep the parish social calendar full, and serves as a base of operations for the Agora festival each year.
The John Balis Educational Building, 615 Mercer Street. Opened in 2006, it houses the parish Greek school, described as the largest in the Metropolis of New Jersey, where children of the third and fourth generations learn the alphabet their great-grandparents brought from the islands.
The former American Hellenic Orthodox Center, Camden. The original home of the South Jersey Greek community, a building that held AHEPA and a Greek school for roughly fifty years before the parish consolidated in Cherry Hill. It is the ancestor of the Mercer Street campus.
Where They Came From
The Greeks who built the Philadelphia region’s community did not come from one place but from many, and they kept track of which. The old fraternities were organised by homeland: Chios and Ikaria in the Aegean, the mountains of Epirus in the northwest, Macedonia, the Peloponnese, the island of Cyprus, and the Pontus, the Greek communities of the Black Sea coast uprooted in the early twentieth century.
The Pan-Icarian Brotherhood, tied to the island of Ikaria, remains active in the Philadelphia area and still helps stage the St. Thomas Agora, a reminder of how durable those island ties have been. Families that started in South Philadelphia or central Camden carried those origins with them as they moved east into Cherry Hill, so that the parish on Mercer Street holds a quiet map of the whole Greek world, island by island, region by region.
Cherry Hill Today
The Greeks of Cherry Hill are now a settled, suburban, professional community, several generations removed from the dish pit. The diners are still here, Ponzio’s chief among them, but the children and grandchildren of the diner owners are doctors, lawyers, and business people, woven into a town better known for its mall, its schools, and its large Jewish population than for any one ethnic enclave.
What holds the community together is less a neighbourhood than the campus on Mercer Street. There is no Greektown in Cherry Hill the way there once was in Upper Darby. Instead there is a church, a cultural centre, the largest Greek school in the New Jersey metropolis, and one weekend each October when the whole town seems to show up for the Agora.
That festival has become the community’s front door, the moment when a quiet, dispersed Greek presence makes itself loud and welcoming for everyone else. For one weekend, the smell of the grill on Mercer Street tells the rest of Cherry Hill exactly who has been here all along.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a Greek community in Cherry Hill, New Jersey?
Yes. The Greeks in Cherry Hill, New Jersey are centred on St. Thomas Greek Orthodox Church on Mercer Street, established in 1966. The community is smaller than Cherry Hill’s well-known Jewish population, but it is well-organised and active, especially around the parish and its annual festival.
What is the Greek Agora Festival?
The Greek Agora is the annual festival staged by St. Thomas Greek Orthodox Church in Cherry Hill each autumn. Running since the 1970s, it is billed as the largest Greek food and wine festival in the Delaware Valley and has been ranked among the best Greek festivals in the United States.
Where did Cherry Hill’s Greek families originally come from?
Most descend from Greek immigrants who first settled in South Philadelphia and Camden, with family origins on islands and regions such as Chios, Ikaria, Epirus, Macedonia, the Peloponnese, Cyprus, and the Pontus. They moved out to suburbs like Cherry Hill from the 1950s onward.
Why are so many South Jersey diners Greek-owned?
Greek immigrants entered the food trade because it needed hard work more than fluent English. Many started washing dishes, became cooks, then owners. From the 1950s through the 1960s dozens of Greek-owned diners opened across Camden County, including Ponzio’s in Cherry Hill, founded by the Fifis family in 1964.
What is St. Thomas Greek Orthodox Church?
St. Thomas is the Greek Orthodox parish that anchors the Greeks in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Established in 1966 with the church built in 1967, its Mercer Street campus includes the Danielle Kousoulis Cultural Center, the John Balis Educational Building housing the largest Greek school in the Metropolis of New Jersey, and a senior housing centre.
Is Cherry Hill’s Greek community the same as its Jewish community?
No. Cherry Hill has a large and long-established Jewish community with many synagogues and day schools, which is distinct from the smaller Greek Orthodox community. The two are separate, though both are part of what makes the township’s religious and cultural life so layered.
If your family’s story passed through Cherry Hill, or any of the places Greeks have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village on Ikaria or Chios to a diner in Camden, to a parish hall on Mercer Street, to wherever you are now.