The Bihać district in 1941
Bihać and the Petrovac region lay within the borders of the Independent State of Croatia, the Axis-sponsored state proclaimed in 1941, and its Serbian population was targeted in the first months of that state's existence. The measures against them are attributed in the sources to Ljubomir Kvaternik, the NDH-aligned county prefect, who barred Serbs and Jews from the town and its district and had them seized irrespective of age or sex. The sources differ on when the order was issued — one dates it to mid-July 1941, another to June of that year — but they agree on its content and on its immediate consequence.
Those arrested were held in the Kula fortress-prison in Bihać. From there they were transported by truck to sites already prepared for their killing: Garavice on the hillside west of the town, together with Karađorđevo Selo and Čerkezovac. The killings were carried out by shooting and by stabbing, and the bodies were buried in pits dug beforehand or thrown into the Klokot and Una rivers; local accounts recall the water supply being fouled by them.
The scale of the killing
The number of the dead is not fixed with certainty, and the sources set it out as a range rather than a figure. A memorial plaque raised at the site in 1949 recorded twelve thousand Serbs killed between June and October 1941. Later estimates place the toll between roughly seven thousand and twelve thousand, and some higher still. The killings were concentrated in the weeks from late July into August, continuing into the autumn.
Those killed at Garavice were overwhelmingly Serbs, but not only Serbs: Jews and some Roma of the district were murdered there as well. Children were among the victims throughout. The Church's commemoration names the Serbs of Bihać and the Petrovac region, whose suffering it records; it does not thereby narrow the site's history, which the civil memorials at Garavice mark in its whole extent.
Relics & Shrines
The martyrs have no relics gathered for veneration. Their bodies lie in the mass graves at Garavice and at the second grave site about a kilometre to the north, or were lost in the Klokot and Una rivers.
A memorial complex was raised over the ground in 1981 to the design of the Yugoslav architect Bogdan Bogdanović, and unveiled on 27 July of that year, the fortieth anniversary of the local uprising. It consists of fifteen unmortared monoliths of local bihaćite stone, between four and six metres tall — thirteen set along a winding path across the Garavice hillside, which Bogdanović called the Mourning Women, and two further columns marking the northern grave. The complex was declared a national monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2011. It has since suffered neglect and vandalism, including Ustaša graffiti.
The date of that unveiling, 27 July, is the same civil-calendar date the Serbian Orthodox Church's 2025 decree later assigned as the martyrs' feast; the coincidence is noted in the documentation of the memorial site.
Glorification
The Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church, sitting in Belgrade from 13 to 17 May 2025 under the presidency of Patriarch Porfirije, glorified six individual saints and three collective bodies of holy martyrs. The Martyrs of Garavice and Bihać-Petrovac were among the three collective commemorations, together with the Martyrs of Reškovice, killed in 1688, and the Venerable Martyrs of Rmanj. The individuals glorified at the same session were Nikodim (Milaš), Bishop of Dalmatia; Protosyncellus Kiril (Cvjetković); the priests Mihailo Barbić and Ilija Rodić; the Venerable Martyr Jovan of Stjenik; and the Holy and Blessed Ana, mother of St Vasilije of Ostrog.
The cause was brought before the Assembly on the proposal of Bishop Sergius of Bihać-Petrovac, the hierarch of the diocese in which the killings took place. The Assembly's communique fixes the feast as 27 July / 14 July annually. At the same session the feast of the Child Martyrs of Jastrebarsko and Sisak was reassigned to 13 July / 30 June.
The communique gives no further particulars of the Garavice group — no names, no count, no narrative of the killings. What is known of them rests on the diocesan record and on the historical documentation of the site.
Miracles & Traditions
Historically Documented: nothing of the kind is recorded of this commemoration. The glorification decree of 2025 states no miracles, and the sources available carry none. The Church's act rests on the manner of the martyrs' death rather than on wonders reported after it.
Traditional Accounts: the memory preserved locally is of the arrests, the Kula prison, the trucks and the pits, and of the rivers running foul — an account of what was done, transmitted as testimony rather than as legend. The profile records no further tradition, since the sources supply none.
