Krizina Bojanc

Krizina Bojanc was a Slovenian Roman Catholic religious sister of the Congregation of the Daughters of Divine Charity and is venerated as one of the Blessed Martyrs of Drina. She was born on 14 May 1885 in the village of Zbure in Lower Carniola, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in Slovenia. Surviving sources say little about her family or childhood beyond this rural origin. In time she entered the Daughters of Divine Charity, a congregation founded in Vienna in 1868 by Franziska Lechner for the education of girls and the care of the poor and the sick, and she took the religious name Sister Krizina. The institute had houses across the former Habsburg lands and in the later Kingdom of Yugoslavia, including Bosnia.

Sister Krizina was assigned to the congregation's convent at Pale, in the mountains east of Sarajevo, where the sisters conducted educational and charitable work. The community was multiethnic, in keeping with the congregation's Central European character: it included Croats, Slovenes, an Austrian, and a Hungarian. The local superior was Sister Jula Ivanišević. Serving with Sister Krizina were, among others, the Slovene Sister Antonija Fabjan, Sister Bernadeta Banja, and the elderly Austrian Sister Berchmana Leidenix.

The Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 and the creation of the Independent State of Croatia plunged Bosnia into a many-sided war among Ustaše, Chetnik, and Partisan forces. In December 1941 Chetnik units occupied the Pale district. The sisters fled their convent, attempting to reach Goražde. They were intercepted and held by Chetnik fighters. On 15 December 1941 in Goražde, according to the account accepted in the later beatification process, Chetnik soldiers sought to violate the nuns. Sister Krizina and three companions—Sisters Jula Ivanišević, Antonija Fabjan, and Bernadeta Banja—threw themselves from a window into the River Drina rather than submit, and died. Their bodies were lost in the river. Sister Berchmana Leidenix, separated from the group because of age and infirmity, was killed some weeks later. The five came to be known as the Martyrs of Drina.

After the war, the circumstances of their deaths—understood as martyrdom in defense of faith and chastity—led to a cause for beatification. Pope Benedict XVI recognized their martyrdom, and they were beatified on 24 September 2011 in Sarajevo by Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, acting on the pope's behalf. Their liturgical memorial is 15 December. Sister Krizina Bojanc is commemorated as a blessed of the Catholic Church, a Slovene religious who died in Bosnia during the Second World War.