Vukasin of Klepci
The Holy New Martyr Vukašin of Klepci in Herzegovina
New Martyr · d. 1943, at the Jasenovac camp
Commemorated 16 May — Commemoration of the new martyr of Jasenovac
Vukašin was a Serbian peasant of Klepci, a village in Herzegovina above the Neretva, whose household was destroyed in the massacres of 1941 and who was taken to the Jasenovac camp, where he was killed in 1943. He is honoured for the manner of his dying. The account, which came into the Church's hands through the physician who afterwards treated his executioner, relates that the guard, having decided to make sport of him, offered to spare him if he would cry out the salute of the Ustaša state; and that the old man, as he was mutilated piece by piece, answered each demand with the same words — "Do your work, my child" — until his tormentor broke down. The Serbian Church numbered him among the saints in 1998 with the New Martyrs of Jasenovac, and he is commemorated on May 16.
Klepci
Klepci is a Serbian village in eastern Herzegovina, in the valley of the Neretva near Čapljina, of the kind that lived by its fields and its livestock and had done for centuries. Vukašin — the surname Mandrapa is given him in the Serbian accounts — was a farmer there, by 1941 an elderly man with a family.
In the summer of that year the Serb population of Herzegovina was subjected to mass killing by the Ustaša of the newly created Independent State of Croatia. Klepci was among the villages attacked; his family was killed and his house destroyed. Vukašin himself was taken away and ended, with tens of thousands of others, in the Jasenovac camp on the Sava, the largest of the camps of that state, where Serbs, Jews and Roma were killed in numbers that are still disputed and were in any case very great.
The martyrdom
What is remembered of Vukašin is a single scene, and it comes to the Church from an unusual direction. The Serbian tradition transmits it on the testimony of a psychiatrist — the name usually given is Dr Nedeljko "Nedo" Zec — who years later had among his patients a former Ustaša guard, tormented by a memory he could not be rid of and who told it to his doctor.
The guard, so the account runs, had been killing prisoners and had come to an old peasant who sat quietly, watching. Struck by his calm, and wanting to break it, he told the man that if he would shout "Long live Poglavnik Pavelić!" he would be spared. The old man looked at him and said: "Do your work, my child." The guard cut off one of his ears and repeated the demand; the answer was the same. He cut off the other ear, then the nose, then began to carve at him, repeating the offer each time; each time the old man said only, "Do your work, my child." At the last, when the guard threatened to cut out his heart, Vukašin answered as before — and, the account concludes, it was at this point that the executioner lost his own reason, from which he never recovered.
The tradition holds that the old man's name was Vukašin of Klepci, and it is under that name that he entered the calendar.
Glorification
The Serbian Orthodox Church canonised the New Martyrs of Jasenovac — the whole company of those who died in the camps of 1941–1945 — by decision of its Holy Assembly of Bishops in 1998, and Vukašin is named individually among them. He has become, in Serbian devotion, the representative figure of that company: not a bishop or a monk but a peasant, and remembered not for what he did but for four words spoken under mutilation.
Feast and commemoration
May 16 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 29) in Serbian and OCA usage. He is commemorated also with the whole company of the New Martyrs of Jasenovac, whose principal commemoration the Serbian Church keeps in the autumn, and at the memorial church at Jasenovac. His feast is not in Greek or Antiochian calendars. The proper hymnography for the New Martyrs of Jasenovac is modern and under copyright; the office here is taken from the common of a martyr.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Vukašin, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from thee, our God; for possessing thy strength, he cast down the tyrant and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his prayers save our souls.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Vukašin is painted as he is remembered: an elderly Serbian peasant, grey-bearded and bare-headed or in the round šajkača, in the coarse coat of a Herzegovinian farmer rather than in any ecclesiastical or noble dress, holding the cross of martyrdom and often a palm. The narrative type, developed since the glorification of 1998, sets him seated or standing before his executioner with the camp behind him. He appears also in the composite icons of the New Martyrs of Jasenovac, a great company ranged in tiers, and in the newer icons of the Serbian twentieth-century martyrs generally. All of this iconography is modern and under copyright, and no storable image has been secured for this collection.
Disputed questions
- The year. 1943 is the year given by the calendars that carry him, including the OCA; some Serbian accounts place his death in the great killings of 1941, and the account itself, transmitted at second and third hand, does not fix a date. The camp is not in doubt.
- The transmission. The story reaches us through a chain — the guard, his physician, the Church — and is not documentary. It should be read as the Church reads it: as a testimony received and honoured, not as an archival record. The mass killing at Jasenovac in which he died is, by contrast, among the most heavily documented atrocities of the war.
- Surname and village. Mandrapa is the surname most often given; some accounts give another, and a few place his home in a neighbouring village. Klepci is constant in the Church's usage.
- The words. The Serbian original is rendered "Ради ти, дијете, свој посао" — "you do your work, child" — and English versions vary between "Do your job, child," "Do your work, my son," and the form used here. The sense is not in question.