St. Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Catholic Church

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Among a sea of church steeples that dot East Baltimore, the five domes of St. Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Church stand apart with their burnished glow. Since 1992, the Cossack Baroque style church, modeled after Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, has been home to Baltimore’s Ukrainian Catholic community, though the founding congregation pre-dates the current building.

Since the 19th century, Baltimore has witnessed three waves of Ukrainian immigration. The first began in the 1880’s and continued through World War I, with most Ukrainians arriving in the United States at that time hailing from West Ukraine. These immigrants were Catholic and established the first St. Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Church in 1893 meeting mostly in private homes or at other local Catholic churches.

The second wave of Ukrainian immigration occurred in the 1930s, when Ukrainians left their homeland to escape Soviet persecution and the threat of being sentenced to Soviet labor camps or sent to Siberia. The Holodomor famine, which resulted in millions of deaths of Ukrainians between 1932 and 1933, was another factor that motivated immigration. The famine was man-made, the result of programs implemented by Josef Stalin that took farms away from peasants and forced them to live on collective farms. As a result, agricultural productivity plummeted, causing severe food shortages. When Ukrainians rebelled against the Soviet agricultural collectivization policies, Stalin put towns in Ukraine on a blacklist and prevented them from getting food.

In the 1980’s, Jewish Ukrainians again immigrated to the United States to escape the rising antisemitism present in the Soviet Union. During this time, 70% of Baltimore’s Soviet Jewish population were Ukrainians, with one-third of them hailing from Odessa.

Although St. Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Catholic Church moved locations several times, it was important to the congregation that they remain in East Baltimore where a Ukrainian community had planted roots and grown. By 1912, the congregation moved from meeting in homes to having services in a building at 524 block of S. Wolfe Street. The current church, located on the corner of Eastern and Montford avenues, across from Patterson Park, was consecrated in 1992.

From the beginning, the new church stood out from other East Baltimore houses of worship. Modeled after the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, St. Michael the Archangel boasts five teapot-shaped onion domes covered in gold leaf and 45 tons of copper. The outer surface of the church is covered in stucco. The bell from the church on S. Wolfe Street was moved to the current church’s bell tower.

Overall, the estimated cost of St. Michael the Archangel totaled $1.25 million, including the lot on Eastern Avenue, purchased from the city for $10,000. A 2022 article in The Sun reported that some funds for the church came from parish pierogi sales.