In 1768, five hundred Greeks were contracted through the British Indentured Servitude Act to cultivate land near present-day New Smyrna Beach. The colony failed. They walked to St. Augustine. In 1777, Governor Patrick Tonyn gave the survivors sanctuary in the Avero House on St. George Street, and the second floor became their church. Menorcan settlers — refugees from that same failed colonial experiment to the south — had already found their way into the city's fabric during the same era. Two groups, brought across an ocean under contract by a colonial power, ended up shaping the place that outlasted the venture that imported them. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese dedicated the Avero House as a national shrine in 1982; the frescoes and mosaics are still there, still free to enter. What the colony couldn't hold, the city absorbed and kept.
