A Dalmatian formation between three churches
Dalmatia in the mid-nineteenth century was Austro-Hungarian territory, and Milaš's own household reflected the mixture of the coast: an Orthodox Serb father whose family traced back to Duvno in Bosnia, and an Italian mother. The accounts differ on her confession — one records her as Catholic, another that she entered Orthodoxy before the marriage — and the difference is left standing here rather than resolved.
His schooling ran through the institutions the region actually offered, which were largely Latin ones. He learned his first letters from Franciscans at Šibenik and took Orthodox instruction alongside it, then attended gymnasium at Zadar and a Jesuit gymnasium, and matriculated at Zadar in 1863. Only afterwards did he enter specifically Orthodox formation, at the Serbian seminary of Sremski Karlovci, from which he graduated in 1866.
The decisive years were the Russian ones. At the Kievan Theological Academy he took a master's degree in 1871 in canon law and church history, writing on the Nomocanon of Patriarch Photius, and the Academy later granted him an honorary doctorate of divinity. A subsequent year at Halki, the Ecumenical Patriarchate's school on the Sea of Marmara, added Greek, so that he came to the canons through their own language and through the Slavic and Greek traditions of their interpretation alike.
The canonist
Milaš is regarded as the founder of the study of canon law among the Serbs. His six-volume Pravoslavno crkveno pravo — Orthodox Church and Canon Law — appeared first in 1890 and was translated into Russian and German in 1897 and into Bulgarian in 1903. It became the standard handbook of the subject. Over some forty years he published more than 180 works.
Alongside the canonical writing he assembled the documentary record of his own diocese, publishing the first volume of Documenta spectantia historiam orthodoxae dioeceseos Dalmatiae et Istriae in 1899. A separate historical work, Pravoslavna Dalmacija (Orthodox Dalmatia, 1901), belongs to a different order and has not worn as well: modern scholarship criticizes it for unverified claims about patterns of Serbian settlement, and its reprinting in 1989, amid rising Serbian nationalism, gave it a political afterlife its author did not choose.
His command of the canons was not confined to the page. He twice declined elevation — to Belgrade and to Sarajevo — on the judgment that the elections concerned had been conducted in violation of canon law. A canonist who refuses a metropolitan see on the ground of his own discipline is making an argument about the canons that no book could make.
Bishop of Dalmatia and Istria
He was elected to the see on 10 July 1890 and consecrated on 16 September, succeeding Stefan Knežević, and served until 1912; for the first twenty of those years he remained professor and dean of canon law at Zadar as well. The diocese was a minority Church, and the pressures on it were both ecclesiastical and civil: aggressive proselytism among his people, efforts toward union with Rome, and Austro-Hungarian authorities disposed against him.
His response was institutional rather than polemical. He founded a diocesan assembly to give the eparchy a governing body of its own, brought a number of Uniates back to Orthodoxy, and argued for schooling in the people's own tongue — founding a gymnasium at Zadar in 1897, the first school in that city to teach primarily in Serbo-Croatian. A minority Church without institutions of its own is absorbed within a generation, and he built the ones his flock lacked.
For a time he worked in the political arena as well, founding the Serb People's Party in Dalmatia and sitting in the Diet of Dalmatia from 1889 to 1901, before withdrawing from politics by 1903.
Forced retirement and repose
He was forced into retirement in early 1912 — his resignation dated 21 December 1911 and accepted on 19 January 1912 — under political attack, and in part amid the fallout of a scandal over embezzlement by another bishop, Dositej Jović. He had governed the diocese for twenty-two years and left it under a cloud that was not of his making.
He lived out his remaining years at Dubrovnik and reposed there on 2 April 1915, on Great and Holy Friday, and was buried in the city. On 4 October 1930 his relics were translated to Šibenik, the town of his birth, and reburied the following day.
Relics & Shrines
His relics rest at Šibenik, in a chapel prepared for them at the Church of the Holy Transfiguration — known locally as St. Salvation — where they were laid on 5 October 1930, the day after their translation from Dubrovnik. He had died at Dubrovnik in 1915 and was buried there for fifteen years before the translation returned him to the town of his birth.
Miracles & Traditions
Historically Documented: the record of his life is scholarly and administrative rather than thaumaturgic, and it is unusually well documented for a saint of the modern period — his degrees and appointments, his tonsure at Dragović in 1873, his election and consecration in 1890, his published works and their translations, his seat in the Diet of Dalmatia, his forced retirement in 1912, his repose at Dubrovnik in 1915, the translation of his relics in 1930, and the two acts of glorification in 2012 and 2025.
Traditional Accounts: no miracle accounts are carried in the sources consulted here. What the Church has weighed in glorifying him is the confession itself — a bishop who held a minority flock against sustained pressure to submit to Rome, and who was forced from his see in 1912 — which is what the rank of hieroconfessor names. The sources attribute that removal to political attack, and in part to a scandal over embezzlement by another bishop, Dositej Jović, rather than to his resistance to union alone.
Glorification
The Eparchy of Dalmatia glorified him locally on 2 October 2012, close to the anniversary of the translation of his relics to Šibenik. Church-wide glorification followed thirteen years later: the Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church, meeting from 13 to 17 May 2025, numbered him among the saints with the rank of hieroconfessor. One secondary account places the formal entry into the diptychs on 17 May 2025 and dates the first keeping of his feast in Serbia to 4 October of that year.
He was one of nine individuals and groups glorified at that session, among them the Protosyncellus Kiril, the priest Mihailo Barbić, and the Martyrs of Reškovice of 1688. The Assembly's communique set the canonizations within the jubilee years then being observed — 1,700 years since the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea and 850 years since the birth of Saint Sava.
His feast is appointed for 21 September, kept on 4 October of the civil calendar. One source gives the corresponding civil date as 12 October instead; the appointment followed here is the one carried in the decree, 21 September and 4 October.
The dates in the record
The sources diverge on his birth. The date followed here is 16 April 1845, as carried on his own record; OrthodoxWiki gives 4 April 1845. Both agree on the year and on Šibenik as the place, and on the baptismal name Nikola.
They diverge also on where he attended the Jesuit gymnasium — Dubrovnik in one account, Zadar in the other — and on the civil date corresponding to his 21 September feast. These are noted rather than reconciled; the discrepancies belong to the sources.
