Little BOND STREET, from Ryerson University to Queen Street East, is home to a number of religious buildings and institutions.  In the southern half, there’s St. Michael’s Cathedral, St. Michael’s Choir School and St. Michael’s Hospital.  North of Dundas Street, you’ll find the First Evangelical Lutheran Church and St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church.  The street ends at Ryerson University’s newly rebuilt School of Image Arts.

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St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church, 115 Bond Street, originally opened as Holy Blossom Temple <PHOTO ABOVE> in 1897.  Designed by Canadian architect, John Wilson Siddall, it functioned as a synagogue until 1937, and then was sold to the Greek Orthodox community.  It’s now the mother church of the Greek diaspora in Canada.

The church interior is unique in being the only one outside of Greece to have been painted in its entirety by the Pachomaioi monks, Theophilos and Chrysostomos, master iconographers from Mount Athos, Greece.

Directly opposite St. George’s, sits the First Evangelical Lutheran Church, erected in 1898 by German immigrants to TORONTO.  The congregation dates back to 1851.