Đorđe Bogić

Đorđe Bogić was born on 6 February 1911 in the village of Mala Moštanica, near Belgrade, in the Kingdom of Serbia. He completed elementary school in his native village and attended gymnasium in Belgrade. He then studied at the Serbian Orthodox theological seminary in Sarajevo, from which he graduated in 1937. In 1938 he was ordained a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church. In 1940 he was appointed parish priest in Našice, in Slavonia, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and served the local Orthodox community there with the rank of protojerej.

The Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 led to the creation of the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist puppet state under the Ustaše. That regime carried out a campaign of persecution and mass killing directed at Serbs, including the clergy of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Parish priests were arrested, expelled, or murdered as part of an effort to destroy Serbian religious life in the territories the Ustaše claimed. Našice and the surrounding district of Slavonia were among the places affected in the first months of this persecution.

On 17 June 1941 Ustaše members seized Bogić from his home in Našice. Testimonies later preserved in historical and ecclesiastical accounts describe that he was tortured with extreme brutality—his ears, nose, and tongue cut off, his beard torn away with the skin, and his eyes gouged out—before he was killed. He was thirty years old. His body was thrown into a pit. The murder is treated in Serbian historiography and hagiography as an episode of the genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War.

The Serbian Orthodox Church later glorified him as a hieromartyr (sveštenomučenik), one of the New Martyrs of the twentieth century. He is commemorated on 17 June and is sometimes known as Saint Đorđe of Našice. His memory is kept within the Serbian Orthodox Church among the clergy and faithful killed in 1941–1945.