Nestor (Trkulja) was the hegumen, or abbot, of Mileševa Monastery in southwest Serbia, who was killed in 1941 during the upheavals of the Second World War. The Serbian Orthodox Church commemorates him as a New Hieromartyr, and he is numbered among the New Martyrs of Dabar-Bosnia and Mileševa, a body of clergy, monastics, and laypeople from those regions who died in the violence of the war and the period that followed.
Mileševa Monastery, of which Nestor was abbot, is one of the most venerable foundations of the medieval Serbian church, built by King Stefan Vladislav I between 1234 and 1236 near Prijepolje. By the account preserved in connection with the monastery, armed forces broke into Mileševa in 1941 and seized its hegumen, Nestor Trkulja, who was then put to death. One source relating the event notes that he was shot without any guilt having been clearly established against him.
Specific details of Nestor's early life, monastic formation, and tenure as abbot are sparse in the available record, which preserves chiefly the manner and circumstances of his death. His glorification belongs to the wider recognition by the Serbian Orthodox Church of the New Martyrs who suffered during the World Wars and the subsequent communist period.
