Orthodox Churches in Illinois

Organized Orthodox life in Chicago began in 1885, when Georgia Pooley, a Greek immigrant from Corfu, formed a benevolent society of Orthodox Christians to establish a parish; the first documented Orthodox liturgy in the city followed in 1886. In 1892 emigrants from Laconia and several Greek islands founded Annunciation, a Greek parish. A Russian parish was started the same year, the first time two Orthodox churches answering to different bishops coexisted in one American city. Serbs attended the Russian church until founding their own parish in 1905. Greeks, Serbs, Russians and others made Chicago one of the earliest centers of American Orthodoxy.

Annunciation is now the cathedral of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago. Holy Virgin Protection Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Des Plaines belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. In the coal fields of Macoupin County, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants opened a church at Benld in 1907; it is now Holy Dormition.

St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Monastery in Libertyville was built on land that Mardarije, then an archimandrite, bought in 1923, and its church is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. After Serbian Patriarch German defrocked Bishop Dionisije Milivojević in 1964, the Serbian Orthodox Church divided between its Serbian and North American branches. In 1976 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the dispute in Serbian Orthodox Diocese v. Milivojevich. New Gračanica Monastery, completed in 1984 as a replica of the Gračanica Monastery in Kosovo, is the headquarters of the Serbian Orthodox Eparchy of New Gračanica and Midwestern America.