A ‘REBIRTH’ ON SACRED GROUND
Shrine to replace church destroyed on 9/11 nears completion
The domed sanctuary rising in Lower Manhattan, where workers are busy installing translucent Greek marble in time for a ceremonial lighting on Sept. 10, bears little resemblance to the modest parish church that John Katsimatides had discovered years ago.
He often visited the old St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church to say a prayer and light a candle as he went to or from work nearby on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower. The church stood as a quiet oasis amid the soaring financial district.
John Katsimatides “was thrilled that there was a Greek church right across the street from where he worked,” recalled his sister, Anthoula Katsimatides. “St. Nicholas was very special to him.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, John’s relatives held on to hope that he might have survived. They put up missing-person posters in Lower Manhattan and searched the streets and hospitals for him. But as the days stretched into weeks, “our priest insisted that we, for the sake of his soul, read the prayer rites” marking his death, Anthoula said. John, 31, a corporate bonds broker at Cantor Fitzgerald, was among the nearly 3,000 people killed on 9/11.
The old St. Nicholas church was also destroyed that day. While no one was killed in the building, it was crushed beneath the falling south tower — the only house of worship destroyed in the attacks.
“When we discovered … that St. Nicholas was also lost, we thought that there was some kind of a message there, that the victims did not die alone,” Anthoula Katsimatides said. “I remember my mom saying that … John and the other victims were being cradled by St. Nicholas.”
This Sept. 10, the eve of the date 20 years after the nation’s deadliest terrorist attack, she’ll attend the ceremonial lighting of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine, being built to replace the church and to honor those who were lost.
The ceremony will be a milestone in a project long beset with bureaucratic tangles and financial woes but now on track for completion next year.
“St. Nicholas brings me close to my brother,” Anthoula Katsimatides said. “Being able to come and worship at the site of my brother’s death, in a beautiful chapel that not only honors John but all the victims that died that day and is a symbol of this rebirth, is unbelievably important to me now.”
The lighting of the church will come from within. Through an innovative process, interior lights are being designed to illuminate thin panels of marble, mined from the same Pentelic vein in Greece that sourced the Parthenon, the ancient temple in Athens.
The church is being built in a small, elevated park overlooking the World Trade Center memorial plaza, close to the reflecting pools that mark where the twin towers once stood. A huge, bronze sphere that once stood between the towers now stands, dented and damaged, in the park just beyond the chapel’s doors.
The project has personal significance for the Rev. Alex Karloutsos, longtime vicar-general for the archdiocese. In the hours and days after the 9/11 attacks, he was among clergy offering spiritual support to recovery workers.
“People at that point were looking for something sacred, because they had just experienced that which is evil,” he said.
Among the surviving artifacts from St. Nicholas was a paper icon of St. Dionysius of Zakynthos — the patron of forgiveness for having forgiven his brother’s murderer.
“That icon was very poignant, because at the end of the day, for us to go outside of our hatred, we even had to forgive those who destroyed our brothers and sisters,” Karloutsos said.