Stana Arnaut

Holy Martyr Stana Arnaut was a schoolteacher in the village of Prebilovci in Herzegovina and died a martyr in 1941. She was born in 1909 at Metković. Very little is known of her family and her life before she came to Prebilovci. She worked as a teacher first at Gabela, then at the village primary school.

At the beginning of the war, after the feast of Saint Elijah, the Ustaše entered the village and made the church the scene of a terrible crime. On the second day of the attack, 5 August 1941, the teacher was brought to the school, which the Ustaše had turned into a place of assembly and torment. She refused to be parted from her pupils and was killed with cruelty, together with about a hundred and twenty of them. Her body was found by survivors and buried in the village cemetery, in the family tomb of Milan Bulut.

The Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church canonized her in 2015, together with the other martyrs of Prebilovci, and in 2022 fixed their common commemoration, under the name "the holy martyrs of Prebilovci and the other martyrs of Herzegovina", on 24 July, old style (6 August, new style). In Prebilovci a library bears her name.