The Youngstown area is home to one of the richest Greek-American legacies in the country, a distinction that has historically placed Campbell alongside places like Astoria, Queens, and Tarpon Springs, Florida, in conversations about Greek-American life in the United States.
Much of that story begins in Campbell, where generations of families arriving largely from the island of Kalymnos, alongside immigrants from Symi, Rhodes, Kos, Crete, and other islands throughout Greece, helped establish one of the most significant Greek-American populations in America.
And like so many groups that helped shape Youngstown, their story is about more than immigration.
It is about what they brought with them.
Because places like Youngstown have never simply been shaped by industry alone. They were shaped by families arriving with religion, recipes, music, celebrations, customs, and ways of life strong enough to survive oceans and generations.
Many Greek immigrants arrived during the height of the steel boom, drawn by opportunity in Campbell’s mills and the promise of building something entirely new in America. Families passed through Ellis Island carrying stories of war, economic hardship, political instability, and the hope that life here might offer something different.
That work helped anchor families here. From there, they built institutions, businesses, and a way of life that continues to shape the region.
For Greek families, preserving identity was never accidental.
The Orthodox Church served as more than a religious institution. It became the place where Greeks remained connected to their language, faith, family traditions, and customs that had been carried across the Atlantic decades earlier. For many families, that preservation extended even further, with children attending Greek school and church education programs to ensure those connections continued and were passed on.
In his 2023 honors thesis, Greek Immigration to Campbell, Ohio, and the Bridge Painting Industry, George Nomikos Sdregas writes that Archangel Michael opened in 1955 with 135 families and has grown to more than 600 active families today, a reminder that Campbell’s Greek story is not frozen in the past. It is still growing, still gathering, and still being passed forward.
That sense of belonging shows up in the smallest details, too. Sdregas describes growing up in a community where elders were called theio and theia, Greek for uncle and aunt, even when they were not literal relatives. “The entire community acts as one giant family,” he writes.
But Greek identity has always lived beyond church walls.
It lives in grandmothers stretching phyllo dough for spanakopita recipes, in trays of baklava appearing before holidays, lamb roasting for Easter celebrations, and Greek coffee poured slowly enough that conversation always lasts longer than expected.
The same presence appears in local businesses.
Like immigrant families across the country, Greek families here built restaurants, diners, shops, and family-run businesses that became part of everyday life throughout the region.
In Campbell, that presence included early Greek-owned institutions like Maillis Coffee Shop, Alesafis Fish Market, S&A Restaurant, Smalis Confectionery and Pastries, Frangos Barbershop, Fay’s Beauty Shop, Mastorides Brothers Jewelry, and Pizanias Greek Import Store, businesses that helped make the community self-sufficient and gave new immigrants places where Greek could still be spoken.
That legacy continues through the businesses families built, the hospitality they became known for, and the food locals still gather around today. It also shows up in celebration; Greek festivals throughout the area have served as gathering places for food, music, dancing, and connection, continuing to define Greek community life here.
One of the more fascinating chapters of the Mahoning Valley’s Greek story lives in an industry many people outside the region would never associate with Greek identity at all: bridge painting.
For decades, Campbell’s Greek community became closely connected to industrial bridge painting, with local Greek-owned companies eventually working on some of the country’s most recognizable structures, including New York City’s Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. The connection makes more sense than people realize.
Families who settled in Campbell came from Kalymnos, where many had worked as sponge divers, fishermen, and merchant sailors. In his thesis, Sdregas explains that sponge diving was one of Kalymnos’s largest industries and that it was both difficult and dangerous. Men left for months at a time, worked long days at sea, and developed skills around climbing, rigging, maintenance, and working at dangerous heights.
When those families came to the Mahoning Valley, that experience translated into new work. First in the mills. Then, in industrial painting. Then, on bridges across the country.
And when the steel industry changed, Greek families adapted through these trades, building an entirely new future rooted in the same resilience that first brought them here.
One of the most powerful lines in Sdregas’s thesis comes from John Grillis, who explained why Campbell remains home even when so much bridge painting work happens in places like New York and across the Northeast.
“Home is home: the community, the church, family. There’s work, and then there’s home. The New York area is work, and Campbell will always be home.”
For years, Greek families from Campbell traveled across the country for work, building companies, painting bridges, and shaping an industry beyond Northeast Ohio. But Campbell remained the center.
The churches. The family-run businesses. The festivals. The inherited traditions. The recipes memorized rather than measured. The names still found on storefronts generations later. This is the architecture of identity.
To celebrate Youngstown is to celebrate the people who built it. And the Greek legacy remains one of the threads holding that story together. Because what makes Youngstown special has never been geography. It has always been the people who came here carrying pieces of somewhere else and built something entirely their own.
This legacy never left.
Sources & Further Reading
Special thanks to George Nomikos Sdregas for sharing his thesis, Greek Immigration to Campbell, Ohio, and the Bridge Painting Industry (The Ohio State University, 2023), which helped inform this piece through oral histories, community interviews, and research into Campbell’s Greek bridge-painting legacy.
- Youngstown State University Oral History Program, Greek Culture Project (1980)
- Youngstown State University Oral History Program, Greek Immigration to America Project (1988)
- The National Herald reports on Campbell’s Greek-American population history
- Business Journal Daily reporting on Campbell’s bridge painting legacy