St. George Russian Orthodox Church

Russian Church With Relics of the Great Martyr George

A young parishioner drew the name of St. George from a bowl of slips of paper in the summer of 1988, when a group of Orthodox believers in Cincinnati gathered to found a church in the Russian tradition and by the old calendar: in 2013 the cornerstone of the new church was blessed with a relic of its heavenly patron.

This is the second parish of St. George in Cincinnati: the first served from the mid-1940s until the early 1980s, and its framed paper icon still greets visitors in the narthex of the new church.

At first the community used a former Reformed church building on Myrtle Avenue, where they added an iconostasis, removed the pews and set off a narthex. In 2000 a parcel of 1.9 acres was bought on Loveland-Madeira Road, and when construction ran into bedrock the work stretched over years. The first services in the new church took place on October 19 and 20, 2013. Relics of the Great Martyr George were placed in the foundation, and in November 2012 two more particles arrived from Holy Trinity Monastery, one of them resting in the patronal icon.

Here people sing in Church Slavonic and in Arabic, and Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians, Romanians, Moldovans and Greeks pray side by side. Every year the parish holds a Russian Festival and a charity winter evening called A Russian Winters Night.

The All-Night Vigil on Saturday evening and the Divine Liturgy on Sunday morning are served in Russian and in English, and the service calendar for each season is posted on the parish website.