Divinely designed

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/11/2014 (4336 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Huge cedars and well-manicured lawns surround St. George Orthodox Church in Transcona, a place of worship originally founded by Romanian immigrants in 1962.

As early as 1901, Romanian families began to settle in Lennard, in western Manitoba, where they erected a small log building as their first church. In later years, some would move to Winnipeg and, with the same dedication and determination, would form another Orthodox parish of their own.

“The original church the people acquired was an old wooden Methodist church built in 1906,” says Rev. Mirone Klysh, who recently turned 82 and has been the parish priest at St. George’s for 44 years.

“Every time it rained we had to walk through water in the basement,” Klysh says.

The current St. George church was built on the same Transcona land in 1983 at 123 Harvard Ave. East. Klysh says it is unique in that it was the “first Orthodox parish in Canada to offer the full life of the Orthodox faith in the English language.”

Today the church has quite a number of families, young and old, from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds.

“I have done marriages at the request of couples, in full or in part, in Romanian, Ukrainian, Slavonic, Greek, Coptic-Arabic, French, Portuguese and English,” Klysh said.

The church is warm and inviting. Most of the furnishings from the original church –the pews, the iconostas, the artwork and the chandeliers — are in the newer church, he says.

A beautiful wooden iconostas holds icons that Klysh believes were done by one of the early iconographers, Dmytro Bartoshuk. Born in northwestern Ukraine, Bartoshuk studied at Ukraine’s famous Pochaiv Lavra school and immigrated to Canada in the 1950s.

He created artwork for Orthodox churches in Dauphin, Sandy Lake, Swan River and Winnipeg as well as in Saskatchewan. He often worked at other jobs to make a living while painting for churches in his spare time.

The striking stained glass window of The Crucifixion in the sanctuary was donated by Sir Thomas Cropo.

Klysh says divine providence must have been involved in the building of the church. A professor of civil engineering who had joined the parish at that time designed the present structure at no cost to the parish. Parish members also made donations and took on some of the work.

Born and raised in Johnson City, N.Y., the energetic priest ended up in Winnipeg in the late 1950s because, he says, “the only Ukrainian Orthodox seminary in the free world at that time was in Winnipeg — St. Andrew’s College on Church Avenue in the North End.”

It was in Johnson City that he was inspired to become a priest by the priest in his hometown parish. “He said his goal was to be a giver and not a taker… It was the idea of doing something for people out of love rather than for money.”

Klysh met his wife in Winnipeg, became the pastor at St. George’s in 1970 and has made this city his home ever since.

 

To tour, call 204-269-3743.

 

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