Our Church
The origins of our church lie in two local parishes. One is Holy Trinity Bukowinian Orthodox Cathedral, Ottawa’s first Orthodox church, which was founded at the beginning of World War I by Ukrainian immigrants from the Bukovyna region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Initially located on Gladstone Avenue, Holy Trinity moved in 1968 to what is now the heart of Ottawa’s Chinatown. The other parish, Christ the Saviour Orthodox Church, was founded in the early 1980s by our present pastor. This church, which formerly worshipped in rented space in the Westboro area, grew from a mere handful of  faithful into a flourishing parish over some twenty years. When the two communities merged in 2003, Christ the Saviour moved to the Holy Trinity building and lent its name to the combined parish. Our church now continues the legacy of Ottawa’s oldest Orthodox parish while maintaining the vibrant missionary spirit of the younger one.
Christ the Saviour is part of the Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese (Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople), under the spiritual protection of His Eminence, Metropolitan NICHOLAS of Amissos, whose cathedral seat is in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Our diocese has over 80 parishes. While it has Slavic roots – it was established by immigrants from the Carpathian region of what is now Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland – the diocese today uses English as its primary liturgical language. In our own parish, we do use some Old Church Slavonic in our worship and occasionally other languages as well. Christ the Saviour has members of many cultural backgrounds; some grew up Orthodox, while others chose to become Orthodox Christians as adults.
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