Walk west from Temple Square, past the railroad tracks and the warehouses, and you arrive at a corner of Salt Lake City that has belonged to the Greeks for more than a century. The story of the Greeks in Salt Lake City begins not in a church but in a copper pit, a coal seam and a railroad gang, and it ends, for now, with a Byzantine dome rising over 300 West and the largest Greek festival west of the Mississippi spilling out around it.
The Place
Salt Lake City sits in a valley between the Wasatch and Oquirrh ranges, founded in 1847 by Latter-day Saint pioneers and laid out on a strict grid radiating from Temple Square. For most of its history the city has been read as a Mormon story, a story of settlement and faith under one church’s direction.
But the valley industrialised fast at the turn of the twentieth century, and industry needs hands. To the west of the temple, beyond First West, a different city grew up: a district of immigrant labour, boarding houses and small shops that the rest of Salt Lake regarded as foreign ground.
That district became Greek Town, and the people who built it had crossed an ocean and half a continent to dig copper out of the Oquirrh Mountains.
How It Became Greek
The first Greeks, in the 1890s
The first Greeks filtered into Utah in the last decade or so of the 1890s. They came from a country bankrupt after years of financial mismanagement and the collapse of the currant crop, the cash export on which thousands of rural Greek families had depended.
They were young men, mostly, and they came to work and to send money home. Utah at the turn of the century was building railroads, sinking coal mines and opening one of the largest copper deposits on earth, and it was desperate for labour that would do the hardest jobs for the lowest pay.
Bingham Canyon and the copper pit
The pull was Bingham Canyon, in the Oquirrh Mountains southwest of the city, where the Utah Copper Company was carving out what would become the world’s largest open-pit mine. In 1904 there were around 2,000 names on the Bingham payroll. By 1912, after a large wave of Greek arrivals, there were 3,239 labourers, and Greek-Americans made up 37.4 percent of the workforce.
Others went underground in the coal fields of Carbon County, to the south and east. By 1905 there were Greeks in Castle Gate, Spring Canyon, Hiawatha, Sunnyside, Helper, Winter Quarters, Scofield and Price. Many of the Carbon County men were Cretans, and Price still carries a strong Cretan-descended Greek community today.
The padrone and the Great Bingham Strike of 1912
Greek labour in Utah came at a price, and the man who collected it was Leonidas Skliris, known among his countrymen as the Czar of the Greeks. As labour agent for Utah Copper, the Western Pacific and the Denver and Rio Grande Western railroads, and the Carbon County coal mines, Skliris charged each immigrant a fee to find him work, then billed the companies a monthly sum for every Greek he had placed.
He squeezed the men further by forcing them to buy from the Pan-Hellenic Grocery, threatening discharge to anyone who traded elsewhere. For nearly two years the miners had tried to expose him as an extortionist.
In 1912 the Western Federation of Miners called a strike at Bingham, demanding union recognition and a wage rise from $1.75 to $2.00 a day. Skliris brought in Cretan strikebreakers to break it, and in the narrow sense the strike failed. But it broke Skliris too. The exposure forced him out of Utah, and the padrone system that had bled the Greeks lost its grip.
Greek Town takes shape
The men who survived the mines drifted into the city. By 1904 the newly arrived were settling along Second, Third and Fourth South between First and Sixth West, and this section of Salt Lake City became known as Greek Town.
It filled with the institutions of a bachelor immigrant world: coffeehouses where men read Greek-language newspapers and argued politics, boarding houses, groceries, shoe-shine parlours and confectioneries. By 1916 the Greeks ran more than 190 small businesses in the district.
In 1910 there were 4,039 Greeks in Utah, around 6.4 percent of the state’s foreign-born population, a striking concentration for a community that had barely existed twenty years earlier.
The church at the centre
A community of single working men is fragile. What anchored the Greeks of Salt Lake was the church. In 1905 they organised the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox community, the fourteenth Greek Orthodox parish in the United States and the oldest between the Mississippi and the Pacific. The first building was dedicated on 29 October 1905.
It soon proved too small. The cornerstone of the present cathedral was laid in August 1923, the first service held in August 1924, and the building consecrated on 2 August 1925. From its earliest years it served not only Greeks but the Serbian and Russian Orthodox of the valley as well.
From sojourners to citizens
Slowly the bachelors sent for picture brides or returned home to marry, and Greek Town became a place of families rather than boarding houses. The second generation went to Salt Lake’s schools, served in two world wars and moved out of the immigrant district into the wider valley, to Holladay, Sandy and the east bench.
As they prospered they kept the church, the food and the language of festivals, even as the old neighbourhood of coffeehouses faded. The Greeks of Salt Lake did what diasporas do: they let the geography loosen while they held the culture tight. It is the same arc you find in the Greek enclaves of the East Coast, from the Greeks in Peabody, Massachusetts to the Greeks in Rye, New York, and in the Chicago suburbs that drew the largest western parishes, such as the Greeks in Park Ridge, Illinois and the Greeks in Palos Hills, Illinois.
The Landmarks
Holy Trinity Cathedral, 279 South 300 West. Built in 1923 to designs by the local firm Pope and Burton with the Chicago Greek architect N.A. Dokas, its Byzantine dome is the visual heart of Greek Town. It was elevated to cathedral status by Archbishop Iakovos in 1968, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, and restored between 1997 and 2005 at a cost of $4.2 million.
The Hellenic Cultural Museum, in the cathedral’s lower level. Opened in 1992, it is one of the oldest ethnic museums of its kind in the American West, documenting the early Greek immigration to Utah through photographs, mining tools, household objects and the records of the coffeehouse generation.
Prophet Elias Greek Orthodox Church, 5335 South Highland Drive, Holladay. The valley’s second Greek parish, it follows the community’s migration out to the suburbs of the east bench, where many Greek families settled as they left the downtown district.
The Salt Lake Greek Festival, on the cathedral grounds. First held in 1976, it has grown into one of Utah’s largest cultural festivals and the largest Greek festival west of the Mississippi, drawing tens of thousands each September for food, music and dance in the streets around 300 West.
Aristo’s Greek Restaurant, 224 South 1300 East. For years effectively the only Greek fine-dining table in the city, it has been a fixed point of the community’s culinary life near the University of Utah.
Manoli’s, 402 East 900 South. Opened by chef Manoli Katsanevas, who trained at Salt Lake Community College and grew up in his family’s Crown Burgers restaurants, it reinterprets Greek small plates with local, seasonal produce. It represents the third and fourth generation reclaiming the food on their own terms.
The old Greek Town district, Second to Fourth South between First and Sixth West. The streets where boarding houses, coffeehouses and groceries once stood are now warehouses and redevelopment, but the name endures, and the community’s 2020 plans for an upscale Greek Town centre aimed to write the words back across the skyline.
Where They Came From
The Greeks who came to Utah were overwhelmingly rural and poor, pushed out by the currant collapse and the wider bankruptcy of the Greek state. They came from the Peloponnese and from the islands, and in Carbon County especially from Crete, whose men carried a fierce reputation that the mine operators both prized and feared.
They were drawn west by the same labour agents who recruited across the eastern Mediterranean, and by the chain that quickly followed: once one man from a village had work at Bingham, he wrote home, and brothers, cousins and fellow villagers followed the same path to the same canyon.
That is why Utah’s Greek community came to mirror particular Greek regions so closely, and why a single Cretan village could end up half-transplanted to a coal town in the Wasatch Plateau. The same valley would later draw very different migrations along the same logic of work and family chains, from the Tongans in Salt Lake City to the Indians in nearby Saratoga Springs.
Salt Lake City Today
The Greek community of Utah is no longer a community of miners. Census figures count roughly 13,600 people of Greek ancestry in the state, with Salt Lake County holding about half of them and the city of Salt Lake itself the largest single concentration. By the 2000 census, Utah ranked ninth in the nation for the share of its population claiming Greek descent.
The neighbourhood of coffeehouses is gone, dispersed into the suburbs, but the institutions held. Holy Trinity remains the oldest Greek Orthodox church in the country and the heart of the largest Greek parish west of Chicago, and every September the festival turns 300 West back into Greek Town for a weekend.
In 2020 the Greek Orthodox community of Greater Salt Lake announced a $12 million capital campaign and plans, with the Woodbury Corporation, to redevelop nearly five acres of church land around the cathedral into a new Hellenic community centre and museum, with the words Greek Town written across a skybridge. The cathedral itself, by design, would be left untouched, the one fixed point in a neighbourhood remaking itself again.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Greeks settle in Salt Lake City?
Greeks came to Salt Lake City and the surrounding region from the 1890s onward to work in Utah’s booming extractive industries, above all the copper mine at Bingham Canyon and the coal mines of Carbon County. The Greeks in Salt Lake City built an immigrant district, Greek Town, west of Temple Square as their economic and social base.
How big is the Greek community in Salt Lake City?
Roughly 13,600 people of Greek ancestry live in Utah, with about half in Salt Lake County and the city of Salt Lake holding the largest single concentration. The Greeks in Salt Lake City form the core of the largest Greek Orthodox parish west of Chicago.
What is Holy Trinity Cathedral?
Holy Trinity Cathedral at 279 South 300 West is the spiritual heart of Greek Salt Lake. Organised in 1905 and built in its present form in 1923, it is the oldest Greek Orthodox church in the United States and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
What was Greek Town in Salt Lake City?
Greek Town was the immigrant district that grew up by 1904 along Second to Fourth South between First and Sixth West, filled with Greek coffeehouses, groceries and boarding houses. By 1916 the Greeks ran more than 190 small businesses there.
What is the Salt Lake Greek Festival?
First held in 1976, the Salt Lake Greek Festival takes place each September on the grounds of Holy Trinity Cathedral. It is one of Utah’s largest cultural festivals and the largest Greek festival west of the Mississippi, with food, music and traditional dance.
Who was Helen Zeese Papanikolas?
Helen Zeese Papanikolas (1917 to 2004) was a Greek-American historian and folklorist born in a Carbon County mining camp. Her books, including Toil and Rage in a New Land: The Greek Immigrants of Utah, broadened Utah history beyond the Mormon settlement narrative to include its immigrant industrial workers.
If your family’s story passed through Salt Lake City, or any of the places Greeks have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Cretan village or a Peloponnesian hillside, to a boarding house in Greek Town and a pew at Holy Trinity, to wherever you are now.