St. Vladimir Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral

Ukrainian Cathedral With a Mosaic of the Baptism of Rus

The old Parma city hall was bought at auction for eleven dollars and turned into a chapel, and a few years later a cathedral with golden domes in the style of St. Sophia in Kyiv rose on the same land: this is how a Ukrainian parish that began in 1924 with a liturgy in a hall on West 14th Street found its home on State Road.

The first liturgy took place on October 26, 1924, in Craftsman Hall in Tremont, and soon Ukrainian immigrants from the western regions bought land on West 11th Street, where the first church was consecrated in 1933 and frescoed in the early 1940s. After the war newcomers from every part of Ukraine joined the community, and in 1954 the parish bought ten acres in Parma.

The present cathedral was founded on August 28, 1966, its first liturgy was served on October 23 of that year, it was dedicated on May 28, 1967, and in 1974 it received cathedral status. Its main treasures are a three-tier baroque iconostasis about seven meters high, made in New York and consecrated in 1972, an interior painted by Eikona Studio of Cleveland, and a huge mosaic of the Baptism of Rus, assembled in Italy for the millennium of Christianity in Ukraine in 1988.

The parish keeps more than a church:
- a memorial to the victims of the Holodomor of 1932 and 1933 on the parish grounds, erected in 1993, and a Holodomor Room in the library
- the Taras Shevchenko School of Ukrainian Studies and Ukrainian cultural classes
- an annual Ukrainian festival
- a parish group that makes pyrohy

Liturgies are served in English and in Ukrainian, and the doors are open to pilgrims and to anyone interested in the history of the Ukrainian community of Cleveland.