History

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin traces its origins to the early Greek immigrants who arrived in Milwaukee at the turn of the twentieth century, bringing with them the Orthodox Christian faith of their homeland. The new Americans quickly formed a community, meeting to worship in storefronts and other rented spaces while they worked toward a permanent home. In 1914, fewer than five hundred congregants achieved the dream of building the original Annunciation Church at the corner of Broadway and Knapp on Milwaukee's east side, a building whose location is now marked by a historical plaque. Annunciation was among the first ten Greek Orthodox parishes incorporated in the United States.

In 1923 the parish installed pews, a change that allowed male and female parishioners to sit together rather than on separate sides of the church, and a choir was formed with organ accompaniment, practices that were groundbreaking for Greek Orthodox parishes at the time and have since become standard. As the decades passed and the Milwaukee Greek community increasingly moved from downtown into the western suburbs, the congregation recognized that a new location was needed, and the parish settled on land at the corner of 92nd Street and Grantosa Drive on the border between Milwaukee and Wauwatosa.

What rose on that site became one of the most architecturally significant Greek Orthodox churches in America. In 1956 the congregation's building committee secured the services of Frank Lloyd Wright, who was influenced by his third wife, Olgivanna, a woman raised in the Greek Orthodox faith. When asked about the predominant symbols of the church, she told Wright simply: the cross and the dome. Those two forms came to dominate Wright's design, a Greek cross floor plan inscribed within a circle, with a shallow scalloped dome rising above a bowl-shaped balcony, supported by three spiral staircases with central light posts. The building cost $1.5 million and was among Wright's last major commissions and one of his final poured-concrete structures. Wright died in 1959, before the groundbreaking, and construction was completed without him in 1961. Archbishop Iakovos presided over the first Divine Liturgy in the new church on Sunday, July 2, 1961.

The church was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 19, 1974, recognized as a landmark of modernist ecclesiastical design that nonetheless preserved the Byzantine symbolism and Orthodox Christian identity of the congregation that commissioned it.

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church at 9400 West Congress Street in Wauwatosa serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of greater Milwaukee as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, one of the oldest Greek Orthodox communities in the country, worshipping today within one of the most celebrated works of twentieth-century American architecture.