Dobrivoje Stranjaković

Father Dobrivoje Stranjaković was a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church, parish priest of the church of the Holy Trinity at Gornji Milanovac, a reserve infantry second lieutenant of the Yugoslav Army and a member of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland. He was shot by the new communist authorities in 1945, in Belgrade. He is venerated as a new martyr in the Serbian Church; our source gives neither the date of canonization nor a day of commemoration.

He was born in 1890 at Čačak, the son of Miladin Stranjaković and Katarina Žutić. His brother, Dragoslav Stranjaković, was a historian, professor at the University of Belgrade, vice-⁠president of the Serbian Cultural Club and member of the Central National Committee. After finishing the seminary he served as a Serbian soldier in the Balkan Wars (1912 to 1913) and in the First World War (1914 to 1918), from which he emerged with the rank of reserve infantry second lieutenant. He was parish priest of the church of the Holy Trinity at Gornji Milanovac. He married Milica Smiljanić, sister of Momčilo Smiljanić, a pre-⁠war comrade of Captain Zvonimir Vučković, and they had a son, Slobodan, and a daughter, Radmila.

After the capitulation in the April War he served the funeral for Lieutenant Velibor Branković, who took his own life above Gornji Milanovac at the moment German soldiers came to disarm them and send them into captivity. Stranjaković was the first priest to come to Colonel Dragoljub Mihailović on Ravna Gora, in 1941. He was a delegate of the Takovo district at the Saint Sava Congress in the village of Ba, in 1944. His son Slobodan, still a high-⁠school student, joined the Yugoslav Ravna Gora Youth, was editor of the youth paper and a delegate to the same congress. His daughter Radmila was a member of the women's sanitary organization of Ravna Gora and was killed by the partisans in 1944, at Gornji Milanovac. Dobrivoje Stranjaković was shot by the new communist authorities in 1945, in Belgrade.