The Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia will celebrate the canonization of a 20th-century hieromartyr in June. New Martyr Stanislav Nasadil, who suffered and died in a concentration camp in Gospić, Croatia in 1941, was recently added to the Church’s calendar.
The local canonization of the hieromartyr will take place at the Cathedral of the Dormition and St. Jon the Merciful in Košice, Slovakia on June 9. The service will be led by His Beatitude Metropolitan Rostislav, the primate of the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia.
The New Martyr Stanislav will be celebrated every year on June 20, the day of his martyric repose.
St. Stanislav was born on October 20, 1907 in the town of Loštice in the former Czechoslovakia.
He studied theology in Serbia from 1923 to 1928 and later served as a priest in Lička Jesenica in Croatia. During the Second World War, Fr. Stanislav was one of thousands of victims of the Ustaşa separatist movement in Croatia.
He was arrested on June 17, 1941 in Plaški, Croatia, and was killed with a hammer in the Gospić camp three days later. His body was discovered in a mass grave in the Jadonovo Caves, according to Petr Balcárek from the Institute for Byzantine and Eastern Christian Studies.
He was canonized by the Serbian Church in 1961. The Church in Czechoslovakia was a canonical part of the Serbian Orthodox Church at the time of St. Stanislav’s martyrdom.
Translated by: Orthochristian.com
