Orthodox Churches in Wisconsin

Immigrants organized Orthodox parishes in Wisconsin in the early twentieth century. Shortly after 1900, East Slav families from Austria-Hungary and Ukraine settled in Bayfield County to farm or work in sawmills; their church at Cornucopia, St. Mary's, dates to about 1910, and Holy Assumption at Lublin to about 1908. St. Mary's, one of several Russian Orthodox churches in rural Wisconsin, belonged to the North American diocese that became the Orthodox Church in America in 1970. Greek parishes in Milwaukee and Sheboygan existed by 1911. In 1912, with about 2,500 Serbs in Milwaukee, a congregation was founded that became St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Cathedral, and many other Serbs settled in the surrounding towns.

Postwar immigrants from displaced-person camps in Germany reached Milwaukee, and St. Sava built a new Serbo-Byzantine church from 1956 to 1958. The church could be designated a cathedral after a bishop for the Midwest American Diocese was consecrated there in 1963. In Wauwatosa, Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1956 and completed in 1961, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

St. John Chrysostomos Greek Orthodox Monastery, a convent founded in 1994 at Pleasant Prairie, belongs to the Chicago Metropolis of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. It draws on the monastic tradition of Mount Athos and offers hospitality to visiting pilgrims. Saint Paul the Apostle Orthodox Monastery, a small brotherhood of the Orthodox Church in America, aims to bring the Athonite tradition to life in English.