About Orthros

My name is Demetri, and I have been an Orthodox Christian my whole life.

I grew up in the Church the way you grow up in a family: the smell of incense before I knew the word for it, the long services I fidgeted through as a boy, the candles, the bright sadness of Holy Week, my mom praying with me in bed and reading me the Bible. Sundays meant church with my parents and my brother, the Liturgy in Greek, and me not quite knowing what the words meant but knowing they were greater than anything I could imagine. I remember watching the whole church bow and cross themselves as the gifts came past at the Great Entrance. I grew up at Assumption Greek Orthodox Church in the south suburbs of Chicago, and today I am a member of Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral in the heart of the city, where I serve as a psalti, a chanter. From the chant stand you see what I could only feel as a boy: how great our tradition is, and how unbroken the chain of faith that carried it to us. The faith was given to me. I did not find it. It found me, and it has held me through everything since. It is the faith in which my mom taught me to pray for my Papou, my grandfather, who fell asleep in the Lord before I was born. I never met him in this life, but in the Church I remember him and pray for him still, and I trust that one day I will know him.

I work with my voice for a living, and I have spent my career in software and, in these last years, artificial intelligence. For a long time I asked Christ what my path was, how the work of my hands could serve Him. And the woman I love kept drawing me deeper into the faith, deeper than I had ever gone on my own. Somewhere in all that asking I noticed a strange thing: there are beautiful prayer apps in this world, serious ones, reaching millions of people, and almost none of them speak with the voice of the ancient Church. The Church that wrote the Creed. The Church of the desert fathers, of Chrysostom’s sermons, of the Paschal night. People are hungry for depth, and the deepest well on earth was sitting quietly, mostly unadvertised, exactly where it has been for two thousand years.

So I started building Orthros. A prayer companion, in the tradition, out of the Church’s own treasury: her prayers, her Scriptures, the lives of her saints, the parables opened the way the Fathers opened them. Every text in it comes from the received tradition, with its source shown. Nothing is generated. There are no streaks, no scores, nothing designed to hook you. It is designed to help you pray today, and then, honestly, to get out of the way.

Why go to all this trouble? Sixteen centuries ago St Athanasius the Great wrote one sentence that holds the whole faith: the Son of God became man so that we might become god. The Church calls this theosis. Not that we become what God is by nature, but that by His grace we are made like Christ, filled with His life, transfigured the way the saints were transfigured. That is what every prayer in this app is for. That is what the fasts are for, and the feasts, and the Liturgy. I want as many people as possible to walk that road, because I love Christ, and I want everyone to become like Him.

I want to say this plainly: I am not a priest, and this app is not a church. I build it as a layman, under the guidance of my priest, who is overseeing this work and whose name is officially listed at our cathedral. He blesses the work and reads what goes into it, and he is the first to remind me of the one rule the whole project lives by: an app can point you toward the Church, but it can never be the Church. The chalice is not in your phone. It is twenty minutes away, on Sunday morning, at a parish full of people who will be glad you came.

If Orthros does its work in your life, you will notice something over time: you will need it less on Sunday. Because you will be at Liturgy.