The road to Serb Fest runs through a stretch of Gwinnett County that gives little hint of the Balkans. Hewatt Road in Lilburn is quiet, residential, the kind of place where the most dramatic thing on a Saturday morning is a yard sale. Then, for one weekend each October, the parking lot of Saints Peter & Paul Serbian Orthodox Church fills with the smell of grilled meat, the sound of accordion music, and dancers in embroidered vests spinning through the steps of the kolo.
The sixth annual Serb Fest runs Saturday, October 3, from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Sunday, October 4, from noon to 6 p.m. Admission is free, and there is no ticket price listed anywhere — the church simply opens its grounds and lets the neighborhood in. Parking sits next to the church at 1558 Hewatt Rd. The festival promises Serbian food, culture, history, live entertainment, and the colorful traditional clothing that has become one of its signatures.
For a parish that spent nearly a decade as an idea before it became a congregation, that open-door weekend carries more weight than the average church fundraiser.
The story starts in 1985, when Bishop Christopher of the Eastern Diocese was flying to Florida and struck up a conversation with a parish priest from New York. The priest mentioned that there were a few Serbs living in Atlanta. Bishop Christopher followed up, meeting with the son of a man named David Simic and a handful of other Serbs at a cathedral on Clermont Road. Word that a Serbian community might take root in Atlanta reached the newspapers. Then the idea stalled. It would be years before anything came of it.
What finally broke the logjam was persistence. A group of Serbs in Atlanta kept pushing, and on Saturday, October 2, 1993, His Grace Dr. Mitrofan served a liturgy in Buckhead, in the home of a fellow Serb named Pamela Collins. That service marked the beginning of a Serbian parish in Georgia. The parish eventually put down roots in Lilburn, and today it is led by the Very Rev. Protopresbyter Miladin Blagojevic.
The church has been in a season of transformation in recent years. Parishioners have funded an ambitious project to cover the interior with frescoes, and the church is now raising money to replace its old wooden pews with individual chairs in the tradition of Orthodox stasidia — the hinged seats along the walls of Orthodox temples. The existing pews, the parish notes, are large and heavy, and they were moved and rearranged so often during the fresco work that they have grown wobbly and worn. Each new chair costs $300, and the church has been inviting parishioners and friends to donate one or more as a permanent, tangible gift to the building.
That is the backdrop against which Serb Fest happens. It is, in the most literal sense, a church throwing open its doors — not just to its own diaspora but to anyone in metro Atlanta curious enough to follow the smell of grilling meat down Hewatt Road.
The food is the headline for most first-timers. Serbian festival cooking is hearty and unapologetic: ćevapi, the finger-shaped minced beef and veal sausages tucked into warm lepinja flatbread; pljeskavica, the wide Serbian-style patty; sarma, cabbage rolls stuffed with meat and rice; pečenje, spit-roasted lamb or pork; and flaky phyllo pastries like burek. Desserts run to palačinke, thin crepes that can be folded around sweet fillings. It is the kind of menu that rewards arriving hungry and staying a while.
The entertainment leans on tradition rather than headliners. Past Serb Fests have drawn folklore dance ensembles from well beyond Georgia — among them St. Stephen from Buffalo, New York, and Serbian Crown, the folklore group of St. Petka Serbian Orthodox Church in Orlando, Florida. The dancers perform in the embroidered costumes that give the festival much of its visual character, and the kolo — the communal circle dance that is as much a social ritual as a performance — tends to pull bystanders in. One Atlanta photographer who stopped by the 2023 edition noted the folklore performers and, with some delight, a mint-condition Yugo parked on the grounds, a relic of the former Yugoslav auto industry that has become an unlikely mascot of diaspora gatherings.
Serb Fest Atlanta is part of a wider American tradition. Serbian Orthodox parishes across the country — in St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, Merrillville, Indiana, Fresno, and Potomac, Maryland — hold their own Serb Fests, most of them in the fall, most of them built on the same formula of food, folklore, and faith. The first Serbian Orthodox emigrants reached the Americas in the first half of the nineteenth century, mostly from the Austrian Empire, the Kingdom of Serbia, and the Principality of Montenegro, and Serbian Orthodox priests had established parishes and built churches on this side of the Atlantic by the end of that century. The Lilburn festival is a much younger branch of that tree, but it follows the same instinct: cook for the neighbors, dance for them, and let them see the inside of a church they might otherwise drive past without a second glance.
That the festival has reached its sixth year is itself a small milestone. It began as a way for a parish to introduce itself to a county of nearly a million people, and it has settled into the metro Atlanta fall calendar alongside the much larger Greek, Chinese, and multicultural festivals that crowd October weekends. The Atlanta Greek Festival, the Atlanta Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival, and dozens of smaller celebrations all compete for the same Saturdays. Serb Fest does not try to out-scale them. It offers something narrower and harder to find: a specific culture, presented by the people who live it, on the grounds of a church that took decades of quiet persistence to build.
For anyone who goes, the practical details are simple. Saturday runs 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday runs noon to 6 p.m. The address is 1558 Hewatt Rd., Lilburn, GA 30045. Parking is next to the church. Admission is free. And the church's own invitation, extended in years past, still sums up the spirit of the thing: come be part of the family, and share the traditions and culture with one another.