If you’ve barreled through Georgia on I-95, you may have noticed a strange sight on the east side of the highway: a B-47 Stratojet bomber in front of what appears to be a medieval English church. Rejected cover art for A Canticle for Liebowitz?

Not hardly. You’re catching a glimpse of the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum. The 8th Air Force was activated in Savannah in 1942 before being sent to England to join the RAF in bombing runs over Germany. The museum, just outside Savannah in Pooler, tells the Mighty 8th’s story in the context of the air war in Europe.

Inside, thoughtful and thorough exhibitions give you a harrowing sense of what life as a bomber crewman was like, especially when you turn a corner and behold a B-17 being painstakingly restored by volunteers.

On the grounds, countless plaques and monuments are sobering reminders of the dead. Among them stands an unlikely medievalist sight.

The American vogue for neo-medieval churches faded in the early 20th century, so I was surprised (and delighted) by how recently the Chapel of the Fallen Eagles was dedicated: May 2002. According to the firm that built it, the chapel is based on no one church but generally evokes medieval English styles:

The design for the non-denominational chapel is based on English parish church architecture, which generally developed between the fifth and sixteenth centuries. The design reflects both the traditional site orientation and building elements consisting of a west facing tower, central nave, and east facing chancel. The stonework and interior finishes are typical of country churches as they evolved through the centuries.

I’d like to imagine that Gothic window tracery left a vivid impression on the men of the 8th Air Force, but the chapel’s stained-glass tribute to All Saints Church in the Cambridgeshire village of Conington hints at more pressing concerns.

According to a Conington-area historical society, “a red light was installed on one of the pinnacles of the Church tower to help guide the planes back from their missions during World War II.” Appropriately, the village sign at Conington shows the church tower beneath the silhouette of a B-17.

After all these years of chasing down medievalism in America, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a pseudo-medieval chapel on a Georgia interstate—but I was. Yes, medievalism is everywhere, but the Chapel of the Fallen Eagles represents a use for it we don’t often see. Unlike many of their countrymen, the vets of the 8th Air Force weren’t dreaming of castles and chivalric frills. Instead, they imagined, and sanctioned in stone, a monument to Anglo-American friendship.

Savannah is famous for its gorgeous and walkable squares. One in particular, Monterey Square, was the site of drama in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—but when I tromped through the square during Christmas week, I was drawn instead to a Gothic Revival church…

…that’s not, in fact, a church. Behold: Temple Mickve Israel! Dedicated in 1878, it’s the third home of a congregation founded in 1733 when 41 Jewish colonists, most of them Sephardic, sailed to Georgia (where Catholicism was illegal, but Judaism wasn’t) with the support of Jews in London.

Last week, I heard a passing tour guide announce that the congregation chose the Gothic Revival style to honor the cathedrals of their Spanish and Portuguese hometowns. That claim is specious; this building was dedicated nearly 150 years after the colonists arrived. According to the docents, the 19th-century Jewish congregants, like their Christian neighbors, simply got caught up in the Gothic Revival craze. Boy, did they ever.

For a synagogue, Mickve Israel is a weirdly pure model of a neo-Gothic church. It was designed by English-born Henry G. Harrison, a renowned Episcopalian church architect and a disciple of Gothic Revival master A.W.N. Pugin. Harrison’s background shows: Mickve Israel has a basic cruciform shape with a nave and transept; pointed arches; stained-glass windows with tracery; quatrefoil designs everywhere; buttresses; pinnacles; and a castellated multi-story tower. The ark is also neo-Gothic, as are the chairs alongside it.

The big difference, of course, is the swapping-out of a steeple with what the authors of Synagogue Architecture in America call “a Middle Eastern element hinting at the true Jewish nature of the building.”

I’d say it does far more than hint. That cupola insists, with confidence and grace, “Our roots are European, the Gothic style is ours to use—but we’ll top it off with a sign of our deeper origins and our present difference.”

A surprising schmeer of myth adheres to this synagogue: that the Jewish congregation bought it from the local bishop; that it’s based on a specific Spanish or Portuguese cathedral; and that the choir loft was once segregated seating for women.

Those tales aren’t true—but it is true that while other Gothic Revival synagogues used to exist, and while others still standing can boast neo-Gothic doodads, Mickve Israel is (as far as I can tell) the only remaining full-on Gothic Revival synagogue in America.

Today, this 200-family congregation reveres its medievalist gem, a building that bravely (but not brashly) asserted that Judaism belonged in a Southern city in the 19th-century—and well beyond. In 1927, when a fire destroyed the tower, the people of Mickve Israel rebuilt it…

…just as it was, and probably always will be: Gothic reverie, Middle Eastern memory, persistent American dream.

Medievalism is intertwined with the history of the American South. In cities like Richmond and New Orleans, where magazines helped popularize Sir Walter Scott novels and promote chivalric virtues, Gothic revival architecture felt right—but Savannah, where I’m spending Christmas, went its own wonderful way. Here, in a city with countless monuments but surprisingly few statues, you’re more likely to find Georgian, Italian, Federal, and Colonial styles, intermingled but insistently American beneath layers of picturesque moss.

So when you’re the new guy in Savannah, exploring the city’s public squares on foot on Christmas Eve, the search for medievalism seems downright futile…

…but after all these years, I know when to heed the signs. They’re rarely as obvious as this one on Liberty Street.

And so we trudge from moss-bedecked square to moss-bedecked square, wondering as we wander…

Is a lamppost resembling a bishop’s crozier the most medievalism the streets of Savannah can offer?

“No,” says a monstrous sconce on Bay Street. “Look lower, fool!”

Any Jesuit will tell you this totally counts as a gargoyle…

…as does this Seussian goof on the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, though his architect spared him the spitting.

But what’s that in nearby Troup Square?

A neoclassical armillary sphere!? Isn’t there anyone in Savannah who knows what medievalism is all about?

“Sure, Charlie Brown,” says one of six bronze turtles in tiny Santa caps, “I can tell you what medievalism is all about.”

Yep, along this square is the Unitarian church where J.P. Morgan’s uncle served as minister when he published “Jingle Bells.” (Until today, it had never occurred to me that anyone had actually written “Jingle Bells,” or that controversy would attend upon its provenance.)

Amusingly, in the 1850s, Pierpont’s church wasn’t in this square, but a few blocks away. During a low point for Savannah Unitarians, the building was bought by African-American Episcopalians, who industriously rolled it away and set it down here.

So yes, it’s a cosmic treat to stumble around Savannah on Christmas Eve and find a neoclassical Christmas turtle that points you to the relocated church whose minister composed “Jingle Bells”—but what’s medieval-ish about an overplayed ode to the secular sleighing culture of 19th-century New England?

Aha! The composer’s church itself—castellated, Americanized neo-Gothic! Its discovery is hardly a miracle, but the sight of it is fitting end to a charming quest—and a fine way to wish “Quid Plura?” readers a merry (and hopeful, and gargoyle-rich) Christmas.