Stanislav of Lika was a Czech-born priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church who served in the Lika region of present-day Croatia and was killed during the Ustaša persecution of Serbs and Orthodox Christians in 1941. He is numbered among the new-martyrs of the twentieth century and is venerated by both the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia.
Sources identify him with Stanislav Nasadil, who was born in the Czech lands and educated for the priesthood in Serbia in the 1920s before serving as a parish priest at Lička Jesenica, in the Diocese of Gornji Karlovac. His hierarch was Bishop Sava (Trlajić) of Gornji Karlovac, himself a new-martyr of the same persecution; the two were seized within the same wave of arrests.
He was arrested in June 1941 and put to death in one of the wartime concentration camps established in the Lika district, where many of the Serbian clergy and faithful of the region perished. His martyrdom is commemorated among the company of Serbian new-martyrs who suffered in 1941, and his formal glorification followed in the decades after the war.
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Origin and Priesthood
According to the accounts of his life, Stanislav was of Czech origin and received his theological formation in Serbia, where he was ordained and entered the service of the Serbian Orthodox Church. He was assigned to a parish in the Lika region, an area of mixed population in which the Serbian Orthodox community was served by a small body of clergy.
His pastoral work placed him under the omophorion of the Bishop of Gornji Karlovac, Sava (Trlajić), whose diocese encompassed Lika. This connection links Stanislav's martyrdom directly to that of his bishop, the two being remembered together among the Serbian hieromartyrs of the same year.
Martyrdom and Veneration
In 1941, following the establishment of the wartime Ustaša regime, the Serbian Orthodox population and clergy of Lika and the surrounding regions were subjected to mass arrest and killing. Stanislav was among those seized; he was put to death in a concentration camp of the district during that summer.
He is venerated as a hieromartyr by the Serbian Orthodox Church and, owing to his Czech birth, has also been received into the calendar of the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia. As with the other new-martyrs of the period, his commemoration belongs to the broader memory of the Orthodox faithful who perished in the persecutions of the Second World War.
