St. Simeon Mirotočivi Serbian Orthodox Church is easy to miss for most Chicagoans, owing to the fact that it’s tucked away in the far southeast corner of the city — closer to Hammond, Indiana, than say, State and Madison.
However, those who have seen the church, at 3737 E. 114th St., are unlikely to forget it: a magnificent pile of Byzantine Revival architecture with its crucifix-topped towers and unique two-tone brickwork with an eye-opening array of arches, horizontal stripes and checkerboard patterns.
The church, which is located in the East Side neighborhood, is likely to get more attention soon. That’s because the edifice is on the road toward receiving city landmark status.
The Chicago Department of Planning and Development’s Historic Preservation Division recommended St. Simeon and its accompanying Serbian Hall for preliminary landmark status.
It was before the Commission on Chicago Landmarks on Thursday as part of a brief confirmation that the designation would align with the city’s planning goals for the area. The commission could vote on the designation at next month’s meeting.
The congregation supports the designation, landmarks officials said.
Landmark status would be a great win for the community and the Far Southeast Side, a part of town better known for surviving the 1970s and 1980s crash of the steel industry than for good architecture.
And if any church deserves it, it’s St. Simeon.
Built in 1969, the building is a strikingly faithful interpretation of Church of the Presentation of the Mother of God at the Kalenić Monastery, built in the 15th century in central Serbia.
The Chicago building is brick rather than stone and has a steel frame underneath, unlike its inspiration. But put the two buildings side-by-side, and you’d hardly guess one is more than 500 years older than the other.
“The two buildings are separated by five centuries and 5,000 miles,” the planning department’s architectural historian Matt Crawford told the landmarks commission, when the preliminary designation was introduced last month. “But the similarities are really clear.”
Designed by Chicago architecture firm Pavlecic & Kovacevic and architect Radmilo Antonije Markovich, the church manages to sit in harmony and contrast with the postwar Cape Cod and raised ranch homes that surround it.
The Serbian Hall, built in 1965, is modernist but adopts the church’s brick color scheme. The two buildings share a large, park-like campus.
“I particularly like the siting of it,” said architect Jim Pavlecic, son of the buildings’ lead architect, the late William Pavlecic. “It’s floating in the middle of a nice open lot — which is just beautiful — with a iron fence, with the brick piers around the perimeter. It’s on the most ambiguous of streets and surrounded by really clean-cut, well-maintained Chicago houses.”
Crawford said, “This was a very different looking church than anything you would ever see in Chicago neighborhoods.”
The city’s landmarks designation report said it’s a mystery why the worshippers — in the modern late 1960s — chose a 15th century design for the church.
Pavlecic said he didn’t know either, but hopes his father’s successor firm, Pavlecic Trudeau Architects — owned by his sister Patricia Pavlecic Trudeau and her husband Marc Trudeau — might have some answers in their company files.
“They’re going to research to see if we still have the original vellum drawings for the project,” Pavlecic, who was just a young boy when St. Simeon was built, said.
The church and the hall were built on former swampland by its Serbian immigrant congregation who worked in the mills that once dominated the neighborhood.
St. Simeon member Juliana Falloon, who has researched the church’s history, told the landmarks commission that when the structure was being planned, worshippers would attend meetings and sign over their paychecks to fund the building’s construction.
“All with the notion that they were going to be able to build their own church in their style,” she said. “I believe that it’s a beautiful building to have on the Southeast Side of Chicago.”
“To see it from the street, it looks like poetry,” Landmarks commissioner member Suellen Burns said of St. Simeon.
William Quam, author of the 2026 book “Fire and Clay: How Bricks Reveal the Hidden History of Chicago,” called St. Simeon “really spectacular.”
“It’s not the grand cathedral style of the earlier generation,” he said. “But [it] still manages, through [its] design, to really take your breath away.”