(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 6, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on March 9, 2025

At this 1938 Seattle cathedral’s blue domes, ‘heaven and earth meet’

By Jean Sherrard

For a first-time visitor, Sunday services at St. Spiridon evoke elaborate ritual.

After the ringing of eight bells mounted on the church’s side porch and tower, worshipers of all ages assemble in the square nave, most standing throughout the hour-long liturgy.

Priests perform a complex choreography before the altar, featuring arrivals and departures through multiple doorways, curtains that open and close, and mesmerizing recitations accompanied by a choir. Throughout, the delicate musk of frankincense wafts through the cathedral.

“We believe in the literal power of the sacred,” says John Cox, the church’s official zvonar, or bellringer. Cox relinquished Episcopal roots to join the Russian orthodox congregation in 1998. “For us, faith is not just a metaphor.”

This includes the physical church itself, which presides half-hidden amid high-rises on a slope just west of Interstate 5 in South Lake Union. For orthodox believers, Cox says, it is “a place where heaven and earth meet.”

St. Spiridon was founded in 1895 by Russian, Ukrainian, Greek and Serbian immigrants working in Seattle’s lumber and fishing industries. The congregation initially erected a wooden New England-style meeting house at the foot of Capitol Hill.

Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, great

numbers fled the new Soviet Union, and St. Spiridon’s congregation swelled to accommodate the new arrivals. The Bolshevik government, however, while shuttering churches across Russia, also sent out “church” representatives who attempted to seize ecclesiastical properties worldwide.

In 1924, ignoring the protests of church members, Seattle courts ordered that the building be ceded to the Soviet emissaries. In the dead of night, irate parishioners broke into their sanctuary and stripped it bare, removing icons, altars and religious art.

For 12 years, St. Spiridon met in rooms donated by the sympathetic Episcopalian archdiocese nearby. By 1936, members had raised enough capital to purchase another plot of land and erect a traditional Russian parish church.

They hired Russian-born architect Ivan Palmaw (1896-1979), also noted for designing Capitol Hill’s St. Nicholas Cathedral and the art deco Renton Fire Hall (now the Renton History Museum). Palmaw had fled post-revolution Russia, eventually landing in Seattle to attend the University of Washington School of Architecture.

“Orthodox churches are not built this way just because it looks cool,” Cox says. “Every aspect holds meaning.”

St. Spiridon’s nine domes — all robin’s egg blue —

represent the nine orders of angels and archangels. Their onion-like design is significant. “They are shaped,” he says, “like the tongues of fire that appeared over the apostles’ heads on Pentecost.”

On a blustery Sunday, he adds a wryly practical, if secular note: “They also shed snow really easily.”

WEB EXTRAS

A cool photo collage from St. Spiridon’s basement foyer illustrating significant moments in construction.

And to view our 360 degree video of the column, please wander over here.

For a short video of the Sunday service complete with choir and bells, click on the YouTube below:

And here’s a video treasure bell ringer John Cox just alerted me to: