Category Archives: Malbis Memorial Church

Christmas Time Is Here

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photo (2016) by Carmen K. Sisson

Twenty years ago, my Christmas card was not intended to be the start of an annual tradition. I saw a white country church on a hill in Bibb County one December and commented that it would be a nice Christmas card image. A year later, I stopped to photograph that church and, a year later, I had Christmas cards made featuring one of those images.

The authenticity of the image pleased me and the response was positive and I decided to do it again if I found the proper image. Now it has become not just a personal tradition but a ritual, the planning for which commences each December. As soon as my cards are at the post office on December 1, I begin – like a Mardi Gras krewe planning a float down on the coast – to think about next year’s Christmas card.

It usually has to feature an old Alabama church – preferably white and wood-framed. These are the preferences of my recipients, actually. I have on occasion featured something other than a house of worship – a boathouse on Mobile Bay, a sprawling live oak – and I have heard what amount to complaints for not sending out another church. As printing costs and postage rates have increased, so has my Christmas card list. Friends around the country and across the world promptly notify of changes of address so that “we don’t miss out on this year’s Christmas card.”

For me, it has become a welcome distraction. I do not go overboard for Christmas – a wreath on the door, a bow on the mailbox – but I do find escape and peace in the personal meditation of signing and addressing a Christmas card. I have written about that kinship in the past. This year, unexpected passings have altered the names on my address list – they always do – but there always seem to be new names to add and the list grows rather than shrinks.

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My Christmas card this year features a church that has been on my wish list of images for years. Malbis Memorial Church (its official name is much more ornate) is a Greek Orthodox structure in Baldwin County, Alabama, near Daphne. It was built in 1965 as a memorial to Jason Malbis, a Greek immigrant who founded the self-sufficient Malbis Plantation in 1906. Over time, the plantation became a thriving community of Greek immigrants with influence in Baldwin County and in the city of Mobile across the bay.

Jason Malbis died on a trip to Greece in 1942 and the Malbis community built the memorial church that he had dreamed of. Greek and Italian artists and artisans did the highly detailed mosaics and iconography that give the church its wonder and majesty. Red marble columns and pilasters in the church’s interior create a splendor that belies the relatively small size of the building.

Nowadays, the church and plantation, which once existed in relative isolation, are on a busy highway surrounded by the sprawl of twenty-first century suburbia. Once at the church, however, it is not difficult to block out the noise of the traffic and forget the increasingly encroaching sprawl and find a place of peace and quiet meditation.

Happy Holidays and Peace in the New Year, everyone.

Roadside Attraction: Malbis Memorial Church

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Malbis Memorial Church

Traveling through Baldwin County’s Eastern Shore near Daphne, be sure to find your way to AL Hwy 181 and the Malbis Memorial Church, a place of worship and devotion that is also a monument to the power and industry of immigrant culture.

Jason Malbis (born Iason Antonios Markopoulos in Doumena, Greece, in 1869) spent his early life in a Greek Orthodox monastery. He immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century. After travels around the country, he settled in Mobile and worked mostly in the food industry. Malbis and a fellow immigrant, William Papageorge, bought 120 acres of land across Mobile Bay and started a self-sufficient plantation that became a successful colony for Greek immigrants. Malbis Plantation continued to grow in the coastal countryside and Malbis himself remained active in civic endeavors in Mobile. The colony’s popular Malbis Bakery became a mainstay in downtown Mobile.

Jason Malbis was in Greece on family business when the United States entered World War II and he was subsequently unable to return to his home in Baldwin County. He died in Greece in 1942. Prior to his death, he expressed his wish for his body to be returned to Malbis Plantation and for a church to be built there.

The Sacred Patriarchal and Stavropegial Monastery of the Presentation of Theotokos – better known as Malbis Memorial Church – was dedicated in 1965. Once surrounded by the plantation’s farmland, the impressive church now sits quietly at a busy intersection, the historic buildings and remaining property of the plantation threatened by residential and commercial properties close by.

photo (2016) by Carmen K. Sisson

The church boasts an impressive Byzantine Revival exterior, with domes, arches, arcades, pediments, and mosaics representing Christian icons. But the real splendor happens once you enter the building. Beyond the vestibule, two rows of Corinthian columns in red marble support a brilliant blue arched ceiling in the nave. White marble is used extensively in the apse, which is crowned by a full dome with a rendering of Christ floating above at the very top. It seems that every inch of the space is covered with paintings, stained glass, murals, mosaics, and carvings. It is an unexpected find in an unlikely location – a place of intense devotion and meditation.

Each time I go there, I find it hard to fully believe the level of profound magnificence in a relatively small house of worship.

A quiet cemetery is just to the south of the church, among the live oaks. It is the resting place for many of the Greeks who made a home at Malbis plantation. Back inside the church, the remains of Jason Malbis are interred in a crypt. Home at last.