What the record holds
The sources for Saint Ilija are the communique of the Holy Assembly of Bishops, the notices published by his diocese and by the Serbian Church, and press coverage of his first liturgical commemoration. Between them they give his years, his parish, the manner and season of his death, and the fact that he stayed. They do not give his ordination, his family beyond one living descendant, his schooling, or a single saying of his.
That thinness is itself part of the record. Village clergy in that region who died in 1941 and 1942 often left no papers behind them, and the parish registers that would have held them frequently burned with the churches. The Church has glorified a man remembered chiefly by the people among whom he stayed.
The pits at Trubar
He was killed at Pascha 1942 — the feast fell on 5 April that year by the civil calendar — and one account places his death on the Wednesday of Bright Week. His body was thrown into one of the pits at Trubar, the karst shafts of that limestone country which were used across the Krajina in those years for the disposal of the killed.
Because his repose fell inside the movable Paschal cycle, which has no fixed place in the calendar, the Assembly appointed his commemoration to a fixed date instead: 26 April, kept on 9 May by the civil reckoning.
Glorification
The Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church, meeting in Belgrade from 13 to 17 May 2025, entered him in the register of saints as the Holy Hieromartyr Ilija of Trubar, together with five other individuals and three groups of martyrs.
The first liturgical celebration of his memory was kept on 9 May 2026 at Drvar, and at the church of the Nativity of the Theotokos in Trubar the day after. Among those who came for it was his grandson, Fr Nikola Radovanović, a priest of the church of St Nicholas in South Milwaukee, who said of it that grief had turned into joy.
