Image Source: Ђидо – CC BY-SA 4.0

A few years ago, I reliably established that Saint Vukašin Mandrapa — the Jasenovac and Herzegovinian martyr — is in fact a fictional, or more precisely, a constructed figure. This is a saintly figure known to nearly every Orthodox Serb over the past 30 years. The official version holds that Vukašin Mandrapa was born in the village of Klepci in Herzegovina and that, following the establishment of the Nazi puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia, he was deported to the Jasenovac death camp, where he died a martyr’s death — calmly, looking his killer in the eye, and saying: “Just do your job, child.”

I discovered, with strong certainty, that the residents of the village of Klepci had never known anyone by the name Vukašin Mandrapa, a fact confirmed to me by a late friend whose mother was born in that very village. I also determined that the story of the pious old man is not a fabrication — but it did not occur in Jasenovac. It happened in the small Herzegovinian town of Ljubuški. The true name of this ‘Vukašin’ was Vasilije Vitković, president of the Serbian Orthodox parish council — a devout man. The words “Just do your job, children” were addressed to the Ustaše (Croatian Nazis) who, before his very eyes and on the threshold of his home, murdered his entire family. We learn about Vasilije Vitković through documentation and testimonies from the post-war trials of local Ustaše war criminals in Mostar.

It is also true that a devout Orthodox Christian with the surname Mandrapa was killed in Jasenovac — but his name was not Vukašin, it was Spasoje. He was a shoemaker from Sarajevo who, on Sundays, sang in the choir at the Old Orthodox Church in Sarajevo. His memory was preserved by Đuro Pucar “Stari,” a later communist official of Bosnia and Herzegovina and once Spasoje’s apprentice, as well as by the theologian Žarko Vidović, who remembered him for continuously chanting to the victims of the Ustaše massacres within the Jasenovac camp: “With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the souls of Your servants, where there is no pain, nor sorrow, nor sighing, but life everlasting.” Precisely because of this, he was ultimately beaten to death in one of the camp barracks. Indeed, Spasoje Mandrapa of Sarajevo — not the fictitious Vukašin — is listed in the official register of Jasenovac victims.

Why am I writing about this in the introduction to a text whose central subject is the war criminal and Nazi collaborator Pavle Đurišić? Because of the growing tendency within the episcopate of the Serbian Orthodox Church to accept simplified and distorted versions of reality — whether out of carelessness and haste, or due to ideological and/or personal motivations.

This tendency might not be so troubling (though it is still inexcusably unserious) if it merely involved, for example, collapsing two real-life martyrs into a single figure — as when the fictionalized newspaper tale of “Vukašin” from the late 1980s is mistaken for a historical account and merged with a factual story of martyrdom.

But when the Metropolitan of Montenegro and the Littoral Joanikije Mićević — successor to the ancient episcopal throne of Zeta, founded........

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