The first Orthodox Chapel to be built was built by group of fisheries workers who had settled in Umnak on what is now Unalaska Island in the late 1760’s. The original church is shown in the Alaska State Library’s Heritage Collection photo above and the settlement is shown in the painting by Louis Choris in 1816. The territory was claimed by the Russians after its discovery and exploration by Vitus Behring in the 1740s.
The Orthodox Church’s missionaries were sent to Aleyaska as it was then know by The Czarina Catherine the Great in about 1794 during the final years of her reign.
Catherine the Great decided to send an entire mission to America. She entrusted the task of recruiting missionaries to Metropolitan Gabriel of St. Petersburg, who sent ten monks from Valaam, including Herman. The missionaries arrived on Kodiak on September 24, 1794. One of them was Herman, the future first Saint of the Orthodox Church in Alaska.
Herman and the other missionaries encountered a harsh reality at Kodiak that did not correspond to Shelikhov’s (the Governor) rosy descriptions. The native Kodiak population, called “Americans” by the Russian settlers, were subject to harsh treatment by the Russian-American Company, which was being overseen by Shelikhov’s manager Alexander Baranov who later became the first governor of the colony.
The men were forced to hunt for sea otter even during harsh weather, and women and children were abused in their absence.
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