St. Stephen Nemanja Orthodox Church ^[1] is located at 216 Park Avenue in Bisbee, Arizona, United States of America. It is part of the Serbian Orthodox Eparchy of Western America under the omophorion of Bishop Maksim (Vasiljević).

Their importance today can be seen in the quaint Old West architecture of downtown Bisbee and particularly the stuccoed hall and the brick Church of St. Stephen Nemanja, a once teeming centre of Serbian immigrant life more than a century ago.^[2]

The church was first built in 1903. The significance and uniqueness of the building is its architectural characteristics of the American Old West of the late 19th and early 20th-century. The church was designed and built by early Serbian-Americans, sons of pioneers who emigrated from Montenegro, particularly from the Paštrovići region of Kotor (then part of Austrian Empire), to America where they first settled in Louisiana and after the civil war, moved west of the Mississippi to Arizona. The church was named after Stefan Nemanja, the ruler of the Grand Principality of Serbia and founder of the Nemanjić dynasty.

At the turn of the 20th-century, these Montenegrin Serbs^[3] along with Cornish folk settled in the southeastern Bisbee suburb near the newly-constructed homes for miners in the 1880s^[4]. When Phelps Dodge began its own mining operations in the nearby Warren District in 1882, neighbouring the Copper Queen Mine, became a stable employer of Cochise County for the next nine decades (1974). Meanwhile, pioneer entrepreneurs developed various businesses, making Bisbee in the early part of the 20th century the largest city in the state of Arizona. The pioneers left a remarkable legacy in downtown buildings, shops, saloons, a bank, and a monument to "Copper Man"^[5] behind them. Ivo Vaso Angius, Vido Markov Milutinovich^[6], and Vaso G. Medigovich^[7]were the merchants who developed downtown Bisbee some 150 years ago.

These pioneers soon became American citizens and they retained their Orthodox faith by having their children baptized by visiting Serbian priests. Today old newspaper record such visits, notably American-born Father Sevastijan Dabović, now a North American Eastern Orthodox saint. In 1903, they bought a property and established a Serbian Hall and next to it the St. Stephen Nemanja Orthodox Church at 216 Park Avenue, the only Eastern Orthodox church in Colchise County^[8]. Also, a Serbian monastery exists in Safford.

In 1910, Serbs in Bisbee numbered in the thousands when the city was the most populated in the territory at the time. Today one still finds names like Vlahovich and Yuncevich in the Bisbee phone book, most of the town's Serbians have left after the closure of Phelps Dodge in 1974^[9]. Many moved to Tucson and Phoenix while others settled in Nevada, another state that drew many early Serbian pioneers. Now there are a few Serbian families in Bisbee that still keep St. Stephen Nemanja Orthodox Church open^[10].

• John Gregovich
• Anton Mazzanovich