Serbian Church finds a home in the Triad

By Laura Graff | Journal Reporter

05/31/2010

Radovan Banovic, a Serbian Orthodox Christian, fled Bosnia in 1998, traveling first to Austria, where he sought help at the U.S. Embassy in Vienna. There, a consul asked where he would like to go.

“I said, ‘Anywhere,'” Banovic said yesterday. “‘Anywhere there’s no war.’ And they said, ‘How about Greensboro?'”

It was as good a place as any to Banovic, one of a small group of Serbian Orthodox refugees who fled their home because of war. Many, including Banovic, sometimes think of returning.

But in the meantime, they are building new lives here.

Yesterday, they baptized a new religious home. St. Basil of Ostrog Serbian Orthodox Church, a cross-shaped building near N.C. 66 in Kernersville, will serve about 100 families.

Orthodox Christian leaders from around the country came to help consecrate the new church, which came to be, Banovic and others believe, through nothing less than an act of God.

Church members started meeting in homes in the mid-1990s, varying their gathering spots until about 1998, when one member — a Wake Forest University professor — bought a house and five acres of land for the church on N.C. 66. The spot was not far from Interstate 40, and about midway between Winston-Salem and Greensboro.

They were a small congregation, but held to the old customs.

A few years later, a development company approached the congregation. The church’s house and land could become part of a proposed 18,000-acre development area called “Heart of the Triad.”

The development company wanted the property. In exchange, if the congregation was willing, the company would trade a five-acre piece of land on Ogden School Road, about a half-mile from the house they had used for worship. The company also offered to pay to build a new church.

The small congregation agreed.

The church was built in 2007, but icons and frescoes had to be painted and blessed. A consecration ceremony — the equivalent of a baptism for the building — had to be arranged.

This weekend, those efforts culminated with a religious service and festival, with dancing, singing, food and wine.

Priests came from as far as Bosnia to help bless the new church, one of just two Serbian Orthodox churches in the state. The next closest parish, church leaders said yesterday, is in Atlanta.

That a Serbian Orthodox community would grow in the Piedmont is unusual, said Metropolitan Christopher Kovacevich, the leader of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the Midwest.

Kovacevich said that in the past, Serbian refugees settled in Chicago, Cleveland and Pittsburgh — cities that offered factory-labor jobs. “I never thought I would live to see a Serbian Orthodox community in this part of the United States,” he said yesterday. “But strange and wonderful things are happening…. These are people who love freedom.”

lgraff@wsjournal.com

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