The Logan Square Preservation House & Garden Walk on Saturday didn’t start at a house or a garden, but at Old Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Church on Palmer Square. I’d never been in a Serbian Orthodox church before. Russian, yes, Greek, certainly (in Chicago), even a Japanese Orthodox church, Nikolai-do in Tokyo.

Looking at the outside, it’s a little hard to discern anything Serbian, except for the flag, or even anything in a traditional Orthodox style.

It’s a handsome Gothic building with Arts and Crafts overtones, I’ve read, though my eye isn’t keen enough to pick out the overtones. Like much of the neighborhood, the property dates from the 1910s – 1910, in fact – and it was designed by Lowe and Bollenbacher, a firm active in Chicago and Bloomington, Ind., a century ago. Apparently they did a lot of work in both places.

It wasn’t built for a Serbian congregation, but an Anglican one. So it remained until a fire destroyed almost all of the interior in 1968. By then, the number of Episcopalians in Chicago was falling, but the number of Orthodox Serbs was on the rise, so the old congregation sold the ruin to the Serbs. They’ve been remodeling the interior in Orthodox style ever since, complete with an ornate iconostasis, bright frescoes on a still partly-white wall, a brilliant chandelier (not sure if it counts as a polyeleos), and a lot of standing room. This isn’t a particularly sharp image, but it gives some idea of the interior. One Filip Subotic did a lot of the frescoes.

I have no Serbian Cyrillic, and my understanding of saint symbolism isn’t all it could be, so I didn’t recognize a lot of the saints floating up on the white wall, in their blues and reds and gold-leaf nimbi. But I did know St. George. Who else is going to slay that dragon from atop his steed?