By Saturday afternoon, the grills behind the church on West Wallings Road will already be running hot. Ćevapi sausages line up in neat rows over the coals. Someone is manning a bocce court that's been marked out on the grass since Friday night. A 3v3 basketball bracket is taping to a wall near the Event Center, and by evening a DJ will have the pavilion moving. This is the St. Sava Serbian Day Weekend Festival, and it lands on September 5 and 6 this year, the Saturday and Sunday before Labor Day.
If you've lived in Broadview Heights for any length of time, you've probably driven past this property without giving it much thought. It sits back from the road, low profile, easy to miss most of the year. What most neighbors don't know is that a few miles away in Parma, there is another Serbian Orthodox church also named St. Sava, also tracing back to the exact same founding congregation, and the reason there are two of them at all has nothing to do with growth or convenience. It has to do with a legal fight that took twelve years to settle.
A Congregation That Started on East 36th Street
The story doesn't begin in Broadview Heights at all. In 1909, Serbian immigrants in Cleveland organized a school-church congregation and gave it the name St. Sava. The parish grew fast enough that by 1918 it had outgrown its original space and relocated to a former German Reformed church building at East 36th Street and Payne Avenue, a structure originally designed by the architectural firm Coburn and Barnum. For decades, that building was the religious and cultural center of Cleveland's Serbian community.
By the postwar years, the congregation had grown well beyond the East Side. In 1952, well before any thought of a split, church members pooled resources to buy roughly 30 acres in Broadview Heights, intended purely as recreation and picnic grounds for the parish. It sat unused for anything more than summer gatherings for over a decade while the main congregation focused on building a new, larger church in Parma. That Parma church, at 6303 Broadview Road, was completed in 1965 as the parish's first purpose-built home.
That address is its own small irony worth sitting with. The street is named Broadview Road, but the church on it is in Parma. The city actually named Broadview Heights is where the picnic grounds sat quietly, waiting for a use nobody in 1952 could have predicted.
The Split That Built Wallings Road
The new Parma church wasn't even fully settled into its role before trouble started. A restructuring by the Holy Synod in Belgrade stripped a longtime bishop of his authority over the American and Canadian diocese and replaced him with three new dioceses. Some parishioners read this as political interference from a communist government back home. Others didn't. The congregation split into two factions, one loyal to Belgrade's decision and one loyal to the old bishop, and both claimed ownership of the newly built church.
What followed was twelve years of litigation, and it was not a quiet disagreement handled over coffee after liturgy.
Police were called to the property more than once to separate the two sides, and at points a judge simply locked the doors to everyone until tempers cooled.
The settlement finally came on March 23, 1975. The pro-Belgrade faction kept the Parma church building and half the property lot. The other faction, loyal to the old bishop, walked away with the other half of the Parma lot, plus that picnic ground on Wallings Road in Broadview Heights, by then grown to about 38 acres. It was a consolation prize in one reading. In another, it was the seed of an entirely new parish.
What Went Up on the Picnic Ground
The faction that landed in Broadview Heights didn't have a building yet, just land. Liturgy was held in a Bohemian hall on Broadway for a couple of years before a social hall went up on the Wallings Road property in 1976. Services moved into that hall while the parish raised money for something permanent. Ground broke on a proper church building in August 1980, and on June 13, 1982, the new St. Sava Church in Broadview Heights was consecrated.
What sits on that property today is more than a single building. Over the decades the complex grew to include:
- A church sanctuary
- Two social halls
- A large event pavilion
- Three soccer fields
- The first Serbian Orthodox cemetery in Ohio
The Parma congregation, meanwhile, was renamed St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Cathedral to distinguish it from its Broadview Heights counterpart, which kept the simpler name St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church. Two parishes, same founding date, same name on the sign, ten minutes apart by car.
The Reconciliation Nobody Advertises
The split wasn't permanent, at least not spiritually. In 1992, Metropolitan Ireney formally ended the schism, and later that year Patriarch Pavle of Belgrade toured the United States specifically to heal communities the dispute had fractured. He visited Cleveland and held services at both churches.
More than three decades later, the two parishes are on good terms in a way that isn't always obvious from the outside. Members from both sides interact at religious services, community picnics, and soccer tournaments, the same kind of gathering their picnic grounds were originally bought for back in 1952, long before anyone imagined they'd need two churches instead of one.
You can read more of this history through Cleveland Historical's account of the divide and reunion and Case Western Reserve University's Encyclopedia of Cleveland History entry on the controversy, both of which draw on court records and parish accounts from the period.
What You'll Actually Find This Weekend
None of that history will be printed on a program this weekend. What you'll find instead is the same thing the parish has offered neighbors for years: a full spread of ethnic food including ćevapi and burek, a 3v3 basketball tournament, a bocce ball tournament, and a DJ keeping the pavilion loud into the evening. Details on registration and hours are posted on the church's own Serbian Day Weekend page.
The festival is open to the whole community, not just parish members, and that's worth remembering the next time you're deciding what to do with a free Saturday afternoon in early September. The property on Wallings Road has been shaping this corner of Broadview Heights since 1952, through a lawsuit, a groundbreaking, and eventually a reunion nobody could have predicted when the picnic grounds were first purchased. The festival is simply the most visible week of a much longer story that's been running quietly in the background the whole time.
If you've got questions about this pocket of Broadview Heights, or any other corner of it, Anthony Colantuono and the team at Real Estate Legacy Group know the neighborhoods here the way only people who've worked them for years can. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what's next.
