Bethpage Greek Orthodox church 'devastated' by electrical fire

A fast-moving electrical fire swept through a Greek Orthodox church in Bethpage on Tuesday, severely damaging much of the building's interior and destroying priceless artwork and icons that date to the 1800s, officials said.

Father Kleanthis Korkotas, a priest at Saint Isidoros Greek Orthodox Church on Stewart Avenue, was near tears Wednesday as he surveyed the damage to the building that opened in 1974.

"We've been part of the Bethpage community for close to 50 years now," Korkotas said. "Nothing like this has ever happened to us before and the church is devastated. And we just hope that we have the prayers of everyone to bring it back to the beauty that it once had."

Church parishioners, working with priests and fire department officials, were able to salvage some of the items from inside the building, including holy relics of Saint Isidoros that were brought from Greece and a painting of the church's founder, His Eminence Metropolitan Petros.

The first-floor fire broke out Tuesday afternoon, causing extensive heat and smoke damage inside the church, which was unoccupied, said Nassau County Chief Fire Marshal Michael Uttaro. He said the electrical fire was accidental in nature.

A total of 75 firefighters from five departments responded, extinguishing the blaze without any injuries in about 45 minutes, police said.

The church, which was built before fire protective systems were required, did not have any working smoke alarms, Uttaro said. A passersby saw smoke coming from the building and called 911, he said.

"The firefighters were working with the priests there to try to get as much of the artifacts as possible," Uttaro said. "So it's a good heads-up thing to get some of those religious articles that are priceless and irreplaceable. Getting them out of there and starting to salvage some things."

But Korkotas said most of the church's icons were lost.

"You can't put a value in a lot of the iconography that was done," he said. "There was a lot of hand-painted icons that were inside the church. Many engraved beautiful thrones for the bishop and the temple for the church. These are all engraved and all imported from Greece and all of that has been lost."

This week's church service will be held at the convent of St. Sygglitiki on Fairview Road in Farmingdale. But Korkotas hopes to erect a tent in the coming weeks outside Saint Isidoros to continue hosting services in Bethpage. 

A GoFundMe fundraiser, organized by church parishioners to restore the chapel, has raised nearly $25,000 in less than 24 hours.

Inside Saint Isidoros, much of the building is in ruins, with the exception of the visage of Jesus Christ, painted on a window pane near the altar, that somehow avoided the blaze.

"We consider it a small little miracle that … when I looked around at the altar, the face of our Lord Jesus Christ is not damaged," Korkotas said. "Which gives us courage."

With Cecilia Dowd

By Robert Brodsky

robert.brodsky@newsday.com@BrodskyRobert

Robert Brodsky is a breaking news reporter who has worked at Newsday since 2011. He is a Queens College and American University alum.