Drive south-west out of Chicago on a clear morning and you will see it before you reach it: a gold dome rising over the low roofline of Roberts Road, catching the light the way a church in a Peloponnesian village catches the sun. That dome belongs to Saints Constantine and Helen, and it is the surest sign that you have arrived among the Greeks in Palos Hills, a suburb where a community that began on the South Side of Chicago in 1909 has put down roots, raised children, and built a school that still teaches the alphabet of the old country.
The Place
Palos Hills sits about eighteen miles south-west of downtown Chicago, in Cook County, a compact city of just over four square miles. It was incorporated in 1958 and takes its name, by way of older Palos settlements nearby, from Palos de la Frontera in Spain, the port from which Columbus sailed.
It is a town of modest brick bungalows, mature trees, and the rolling glacial ground of the Palos forest preserves at its edge. The 2020 census counted 18,530 residents, a figure that has eased slightly since, to roughly 17,920 by 2026.
The largest ancestry here is Polish, by a wide margin, with sizeable German, Irish, Italian, and Arab communities woven in. Greeks are a smaller share, around 3.6 percent of residents, yet their institutions give the town a presence out of all proportion to their numbers.
How It Became Greek
The story of the Greeks in Palos Hills does not begin in Palos Hills at all. It begins downtown, in the crowded immigrant districts of the early twentieth century, and it follows the same path that carried so many Chicago families outward: from the city core to the suburbs, one generation at a time.
A parish born on the South Side
The Saints Constantine and Helen parish was organised on 25 April 1909, with its first home at 61st Street and Michigan Avenue on Chicago’s South Side. It was one of the early Greek Orthodox parishes of the city, founded by immigrants who had crossed the Atlantic in the great wave of Greek migration that began in the 1890s and swelled in the years before the First World War.
A year later, in 1910, the parish opened Koraes Elementary School, named for the Greek scholar Adamantios Korais. From the start, faith and schooling travelled together. The parents who built the church wanted their children to keep their Greek even as they became American, and a parish school was how they meant to do it.
The South Side years
For decades the parish anchored a Greek neighbourhood on the South Side. Families lived near the church, walked to liturgy, sent their children to Koraes, and ran the small businesses, the lunch counters, the groceries, the candy shops, that first-generation Greeks in Chicago became known for.
That world was changing by the middle of the century. The first and most famous Greek district, the old Delta on the Near West Side around Halsted and Harrison, was being unmade by the bulldozers of postwar Chicago. The construction of the Eisenhower Expressway and then the new University of Illinois campus in the 1960s cleared away the heart of the original Greektown, scattering its restaurants and families.
The displacement was a wound, but it was also part of a larger movement already under way. Greeks of the second and third generation were entering the middle class, and like their Polish, Irish, and Italian neighbours, they were looking outward, towards the suburbs, towards lawns and garages and good schools.
The move to Palos Hills
For the Saints Constantine and Helen community, that outward move reached its destination in 1974, when the parish relocated to Palos Hills and built the church that stands today at 11025 South Roberts Road. It was the fourth edifice in the parish’s history, and it brought both the congregation and Koraes School to the south-west suburbs in a single move.
The choice made sense. By the 1970s, Greek families were already settling across Chicago’s south and south-west suburbs, and a parish needed to be where its people were. Palos Hills, with room to build and easy reach from the surrounding towns, offered a centre that families from across the region could drive to.
The gold dome went up, and with it a landmark. For half a century now it has marked the spot where Sunday liturgy, Greek school, festival weekends, and the long rhythm of baptisms, weddings, and funerals have carried on without a break.
A community of the wider south-west
It is worth being precise about what kind of Greek community Palos Hills is. It is not a dense ethnic enclave in the way the old Delta was, where you could walk a few blocks and hear nothing but Greek. It is something the suburbs do differently: a community organised around an institution rather than a single street.
Families who worship at Saints Constantine and Helen come not only from Palos Hills but from Hickory Hills, Palos Heights, Palos Park, Oak Lawn, and the towns beyond. The church is the gravitational centre, and the Greek presence in Palos Hills proper is best understood as the visible core of a Hellenic life spread across the whole south-west corner of Cook County. Greeks have built similar suburban centres elsewhere around Chicago, from Naperville to the west to the affluent enclaves of Hinsdale and Oak Brook.
That pattern, of an old city parish following its families to the suburbs, runs through the whole of Greek-American history. The same arc that carried the Astoria and Flushing communities outward in New York can be traced in Greeks in Flushing, Queens, and across the river in towns like Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
The Landmarks
Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church, 11025 South Roberts Road. The heart of Greek Palos Hills, and its most recognisable building. The parish dates to 1909 and moved here in 1974, and its gold dome has been a roadside landmark for fifty years. In 2023 the parish counted around 585 individual and family stewards, a figure that has held steady into its second century.
Koraes Elementary School, 11025 South Roberts Road. Founded in 1910 and named for the scholar Adamantios Korais, Koraes is one of the oldest Greek Orthodox parochial schools in the United States. It shares the Roberts Road campus with the church and enrols around 195 students from preschool through eighth grade, teaching Greek language and Orthodox faith alongside the standard curriculum.
The Palos Hills Greek Fest, on the church grounds. Each summer the parish throws open its grounds for a festival of food, music, and dancing, with the 2026 edition set for the weekend of 15 and 16 August. Souvlaki and loukoumades draw neighbours of every background, and the dance troupes give the suburb’s children a stage for the steps their grandparents brought from Greece.
Moraine Valley Community College, 9000 West College Parkway. Not a Greek institution, but a defining one for the town. Founded by referendum on 18 February 1967, the college held its first classes in 1968 and built its Palos Hills campus on a former sod farm. With more than eleven thousand credit students, it is among the largest community colleges in Illinois and a first stop for many local families, Greek among them, on the way to four-year degrees.
Thassos Greek Restaurant, 11011 Southwest Highway. A taverna-style restaurant that served the south-west suburbs for years, with live Greek music on weekend nights drawing crowds for grilled fish, lamb, and the long social dinners that are themselves a Greek tradition. It has been a gathering place where the food of the islands met the appetites of a suburb.
The Palos forest preserves, along the western edge of town. The glacial woodlands and sloughs that give Palos Hills its name and its hills also gave generations of families their Sunday afternoons: picnics, name-day celebrations, christening lunches under the oaks. For a community that prizes the long table and the gathered family, the preserves have served as an outdoor parish hall.
Town Square Park, central Palos Hills. The civic green at the heart of the town, where the suburb’s mixed population, Polish, Greek, Arab, Irish, and the rest, meets for summer concerts and community events. It is a reminder that the Greeks here live not in isolation but among neighbours, a thread in a wider weave.
Where They Came From
The Greeks who founded the Saints Constantine and Helen parish came in the first great wave of Greek emigration, the years either side of 1900, when poverty and crop failure drove hundreds of thousands of men from the villages of the Peloponnese, central Greece, and the islands towards America.
Many were young and single, intending to earn and return, and many stayed. In Chicago they built parishes like this one, sending for wives and brothers, recreating the village networks of obligation and kinship in the rooms above their shops.
Later arrivals broadened the picture. The decades after the Second World War, and especially after the 1965 reform of American immigration law, brought a fresh wave from across Greece and Cyprus, swelling the city’s parishes just as the older families were beginning their move to the suburbs. The community that gathered in Palos Hills in 1974 was the product of both waves, the descendants of the 1900s pioneers and the newcomers of the 1960s, worshipping under one dome.
Palos Hills Today
Greek Palos Hills today is a settled, second- and third-generation community, comfortable and suburban. The accents in the church courtyard are mostly American now, the family names still unmistakably Greek. The median household income in the town sits around 83,500 dollars, a solidly middle-class figure that reflects the journey from immigrant lunch counters to the professions.
The visible signs of Greek life are concentrated, as they have been for fifty years, around the Roberts Road campus. The church still fills on the great feast days, Koraes still teaches the Greek alphabet to children whose great-grandparents learned it on the South Side, and the summer festival still draws the whole suburb.
The challenges are the familiar ones of a maturing diaspora. The town’s population is slowly declining, and each generation grows a little further from the villages of origin. Yet an institution that has survived four buildings and 115 years has proven it can adapt. The gold dome still catches the morning light, and on Sunday the cars still fill the lot on Roberts Road.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Greeks live in Palos Hills?
Greek ancestry accounts for roughly 3.6 percent of Palos Hills residents, in a town of around 18,000 people. The Greeks in Palos Hills are a smaller community than the dominant Polish population, but their churches and school give them a prominent presence, and the wider Greek congregation draws from many surrounding south-west suburbs as well.
What is the main Greek church in Palos Hills?
Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church, at 11025 South Roberts Road, is the centre of Greek life in the area. The parish was organised in 1909 on Chicago’s South Side and moved to Palos Hills in 1974. Its gold dome is a well-known local landmark.
When did Greeks move to Palos Hills?
The Greeks in Palos Hills arrived chiefly in 1974, when the Saints Constantine and Helen parish relocated from Chicago’s South Side to a new church on Roberts Road. The move followed the broader suburban migration of Chicago Greeks that gathered pace from the 1960s onward.
What is Koraes School?
Koraes Elementary School is a Greek Orthodox parochial school founded in 1910 and now located on the Saints Constantine and Helen campus in Palos Hills. It is one of the oldest Greek Orthodox schools in the United States and enrols around 195 students from preschool through eighth grade.
Is there a Greek festival in Palos Hills?
Yes. The Saints Constantine and Helen parish holds an annual Greek Fest on its church grounds, with the 2026 festival scheduled for 15 and 16 August. The event features Greek food, live music, and dancing, and draws visitors from across the south-west suburbs.
Why did so many Greeks settle in Chicago’s suburbs?
Chicago’s original Greektown, near Halsted and Harrison, was largely cleared in the 1960s for the Eisenhower Expressway and the University of Illinois campus. As that district broke up and Greek families rose into the middle class, they moved outward to the suburbs, carrying their parishes with them, which is how the community that became the Greeks in Palos Hills took shape.
If your family’s story passed through Palos Hills, or any of the places Greeks have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in the Peloponnese to a parish on Chicago’s South Side, to the gold dome on Roberts Road, to wherever you are now.