On the first Sunday after Labour Day, the streets around Forest Park Avenue fill with the smell of charcoal and honey, and a queue forms outside a domed church for souvlaki and spanakopita. The Greeks in Saint Louis have been gathering like this for more than a century. What looks like a weekend festival is in fact the oldest continuous public ritual of one of the Midwest’s most quietly rooted immigrant communities.
The Place
Saint Louis sits where the Missouri meets the Mississippi, a river city that grew rich on shipping, brewing and railroads before the twentieth century turned. For generations of arriving immigrants it was a place of work first and roots later, with each group claiming a corner of the near north side or the streets west of downtown.
The Central West End, where much of this Greek story still centres, is one of the city’s grandest neighbourhoods, a district of private streets, brick mansions and the long green expanse of Forest Park. It was here, among the Beaux-Arts apartments and tree-lined boulevards, that the community planted the church it still gathers around today.
How It Became Greek
The Greeks who came to Saint Louis arrived as part of the great wave that carried hundreds of thousands of mostly young men out of Greece and the Ottoman lands in the decades on either side of 1900. They came chasing wages, intending to send money home and, often, to return. Many never did.
Confectioners and candy men
The trade that defined the early Saint Louis Greeks was sweets. Greek immigrants learned the confectioner’s craft and opened candy kitchens and soda fountains across the city, a pattern repeated in Greek communities from Chicago to the South.
The most famous survivor is Crown Candy Kitchen, opened in 1913 by Harry Karandzieff and his friend Pete Jugaloff, two young men from cobbled mountain villages in northern Greece. Harry became sole owner within a year and ran the shop until 1951, when his son George took over. Four generations of the same Greek family have stood behind the same marble counter ever since.
Building a church
A scattered immigrant community needed an anchor, and for Orthodox Greeks that anchor was the parish. The early years were not smooth. After the closure of an earlier congregation and the financial troubles of the city’s first Greek parish, Saint Louis Greeks were left without a single settled church.
Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was founded in 1917 as the city’s second Greek Orthodox parish, taking root on the north side. The young parish bought an existing Lutheran building at Garrison and Saint Louis avenues for fifteen thousand dollars.
Then disaster struck. In 1927 the great tornado that tore through the city flattened the building. The congregation, barely a decade old, had to begin again.
Forest Park Avenue
The answer was a move west and a fresh start. In 1931 Saint Nicholas opened a new church at 4967 Forest Park Avenue, in what is now the Central West End, and it has stood there ever since.
The interior tells the story of a community that wanted to carry the old country with it. The iconostasis, the screen of icons before the altar, was completed in 1947 by two New York artists who modelled it on the Church of the Pantanassa at Mystras in Greece, first dedicated in 1428. In the early decades women sat in the balcony and later to the left, men to the right, and only from the 1950s did families begin to sit together.
The parish expanded with a community centre, the kind of hall where Greek school met, where dances and luncheons were held, and where the festival kitchen could finally work indoors.
The brotherhood
Alongside the church came the lodge. AHEPA, the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association, was founded nationally in 1922 to defend Greek immigrants against the discrimination of the era. Saint Louis chartered its own AHEPA Chapter 53 on 22 October 1924, with Gus Theodorow, a local bakery owner, among its founders.
The chapter became a backbone of community life. It raised money through fish fries, gyro sales, festivals and dances, awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships to Greek-American students from 1950 onward, and built senior housing. Saint Louis was prominent enough to host the national AHEPA convention in both 1957 and 1987.
A second parish moves to the county
As the community grew and prospered, it followed the city’s wider drift outward to the suburbs. Assumption Greek Orthodox Church, chartered in 1940, began in a small city church and moved several times as its members rose and resettled.
In 1978 it settled at 1755 Des Peres Road in Town and Country, a wealthy western suburb, after two earlier moves driven by growth and shifting demographics. The result is the pattern Saint Louis Greeks live in today: a historic urban parish in the Central West End and a thriving suburban one in the county, each with its own festival and its own crowd.
The Landmarks
Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, 4967 Forest Park Avenue. The community’s spiritual heart since 1931, a domed Orthodox church in the Central West End. Its iconostasis is a careful copy of a fifteenth-century church at Mystras, and its festival is the oldest Greek event in the city.
Crown Candy Kitchen, 1401 Saint Louis Avenue. Opened in 1913 at the corner of 14th Street and Saint Louis Avenue by two Greek-Macedonian immigrants, it is the oldest soda fountain in the Saint Louis area. The malts, sundaes and BLTs draw queues down the block more than a century on.
Assumption Greek Orthodox Church, 1755 Des Peres Road, Town and Country. The suburban parish, chartered in 1940 and settled here in 1978. It hosts a Greek luncheon every Friday and the popular Memorial Day weekend Greek festival, with lamb shank, dolmades and church tours.
Olympia Kebob House and Taverna, 1543 McCausland Avenue. Opened in 1980, first as a Greek deli and now a full restaurant, it is regularly voted the best gyro in town. Its recipes come from the island of Rhodes, a reminder of how specific these family migrations were.
Spiro’s Restaurant. A family immigrant institution whose original Bel-Nor location ran for four decades before closing, spawning sibling restaurants across the metro. The surviving Spiro’s in Saint Charles still serves the saganaki and Greek classics that made the name.
The Saint Nicholas Greek Festival, Central West End. First held in 1917 and marking its centenary in 2017, this Labour Day weekend gathering is the oldest Greek festival in the region. Tens of thousands come for baklava, folk dancing, church tours and a raffle for a new car.
Where They Came From
The Saint Louis Greeks did not come from Greece in general but from particular places, as nearly all chain migrations do. The founders of Crown Candy came from villages in the Greek-Macedonian north, the mountainous region around the modern border that sent so many of its sons abroad in the early twentieth century.
Olympia Kebob’s recipes trace to Rhodes, the largest of the Dodecanese islands in the far southeast of the Aegean. Across the community you find the usual island and mainland origins of the great migration: the Peloponnese, the Aegean islands, and the towns of the north.
What drew them was opportunity and chain. One brother or cousin opened a candy kitchen or a restaurant, then sent word and a steamship fare home. A village in Greece could end up with a whole street represented behind soda fountains in a single American city. New waves arrived after the First World War, again before the Second, and once more in the 1990s.
Saint Louis Today
The Greek community of Saint Louis is no longer a tight urban enclave, if it ever truly was one. Like most successful immigrant groups, its descendants have spread across the metro, from the Central West End to Town and Country and out into Saint Charles County. The two parishes, one urban and one suburban, hold the centre.
What remains remarkably durable is the public life. The Saint Nicholas festival has run, in one form or another, since 1917, and the Assumption festival packs the western suburbs every Memorial Day weekend. The Hellenic Spirit Foundation, founded in 1991, has given more than a million dollars to local causes and sponsors lectures and cultural programmes across the region.
Greek life in Saint Louis is now carried as much by food and festival as by the daily presence of a neighbourhood. The candy counter at Crown Candy, the gyro line at Olympia, the dancers in the church car park each September: these are how a city remembers that some of its most American institutions began with young men from Greek villages who never quite went home.
The Greeks in Saint Louis sit alongside the older immigrant stories of the city, the Italians on the Hill just a few minutes south of Olympia Kebob, the Germans of Soulard, and the more recent arrivals reshaping the region’s suburbs. For the wider Greek-American story, their experience echoes that of fellow Hellenes in Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Charlotte and the old leather city of Peabody, each a variation on the same theme of church, festival and family business.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Greeks first settle in Saint Louis?
Greeks arrived in Saint Louis as part of the great wave of migration around 1900, with the community well established by the 1910s. Crown Candy Kitchen opened in 1913 and Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was founded in 1917, both signs of a community already putting down roots.
Where is the Greek community in Saint Louis based?
The historic heart of the Greeks in Saint Louis is Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church at 4967 Forest Park Avenue in the Central West End. A second major parish, Assumption Greek Orthodox Church, sits in the western suburb of Town and Country, reflecting the community’s spread across the metro.
What is the oldest Greek business in Saint Louis?
Crown Candy Kitchen, opened in 1913 by Greek-Macedonian immigrants Harry Karandzieff and Pete Jugaloff, is the oldest soda fountain in the Saint Louis area. The same family has run it for four generations.
When is the Saint Louis Greek Festival?
The Saint Nicholas Greek Festival is held over Labour Day weekend in the Central West End and dates back to 1917, marking its centenary in 2017. A second festival, hosted by Assumption Greek Orthodox Church in Town and Country, takes place over Memorial Day weekend.
Why did Greeks in Saint Louis go into the candy business?
Confectionery was a common trade for Greek immigrants across America, and the Greeks in Saint Louis followed that pattern, opening candy kitchens and soda fountains. The skills travelled well, required modest capital, and let families build businesses they could pass down, as Crown Candy Kitchen shows.
Are there still Greek restaurants in Saint Louis?
Yes. Olympia Kebob House and Taverna on McCausland Avenue, open since 1980, is a long-standing favourite, and the Spiro’s family of restaurants continues in Saint Charles. The two Greek Orthodox parishes also run festivals each year serving traditional food.
If your family’s story passed through Saint Louis, or any of the places Greeks have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in the Greek-Macedonian mountains or the island of Rhodes, to a candy counter on Saint Louis Avenue or a church on Forest Park Avenue, to wherever you are now.