In Kosovo, Christians convert hope to reviving the pre-Islamic past

The Catholic priest stood before the altar in the hilltop church for the mass baptism, dipping dozens of heads in water and using his finger to draw a cross on each forehead.

He then rejoiced in the revival of the soul of Christianity in a land where the vast majority of people were Muslim – like the men, women and children standing before him.

The ceremony was one of many taking place in recent months in Kosovo, a former Serbian territory inhabited mainly by ethnic Albanians that declared itself an independent state in 2008. In a census last spring, 93% of the population declared themselves Muslim and only 1.75% as Roman Catholic. .

A handful of Albanian-born Christian activists, all of whom converted to Islam, are urging their relatives to embrace the church as an expression of their identity. They call it the “movement of return,” an attempt to revive the pre-Islamic past that they see as an anchor for Kosovo’s place in Europe and a barrier to rampant religious extremism. coming from the Middle East.

Until the Ottoman Empire conquered what is now Kosovo and other parts of the Balkans in the 14th century, bringing with it Islam, ethnic Albanians were predominantly Catholic. Under Ottoman rule, which lasted until 1912, most Kosovar people converted.

By reversing that process, ethnic Albanians can restore their original identity, said Father Fran Kolaj, the priest who performed the baptism outside the village of Llapushnik.

Ethnic Albanians, descended from an ancient people called the Illyrians, live primarily in Albania, a country on the Adriatic Sea. But they also make up the majority of the population in neighboring Kosovo and more than a quarter of the population in North Macedonia.

At the church where the baptism took place, symbols of nationalism jostled with religious iconography. The Albanian double-headed eagle symbol decorates the bell tower and is also the screen behind the altar.

“It is time for us to return to where we belong – with Christ,” Father Kolaj said in an interview.

In many Muslim lands, renouncing Islam can result in severe punishment, sometimes even death. So far, the baptism ceremonies taking place in Kosovo have not sparked any violent protests, although there have been some angry denunciations online. (It is still unknown how many conversions took place.)

But historians, who agree that Christianity was present in Kosovo long before the Ottoman Empire brought Islam, question the thinking behind the movement.

“From a historical perspective, what they said is correct,” said Durim Abdullahu, a historian at the University of Pristina. However, he added, “their logic means that we must all become pagans” because the people who lived on the territory of present-day Kosovo before the arrival of Christianity and later Islam were are people without faith.

Like many other Kosovars, Mr. Abdullahu said he believes that Serbia, which has a predominantly Orthodox population, helped promote the return movement as a way of sowing discord in Kosovo. While Serbia has long been accused of undermining the stability of KosovoThere is no evidence that it boosted conversions.

Archaeologists in 2022 discovered the ruins of a sixth-century Roman church near Pristina, and in 2023 found a mosaic with an inscription indicating that early Albanians, or at least a people who were probably related to them, the Christians.

However, Christophe Goddard, a French archaeologist working at the site, believes that imposing modern concepts of nation and ethnicity on ancient peoples is wrong. “This is not history but modern politics,” he said.

Traces of Kosovo’s distant pre-Islamic past survive in a small number of families who cling to Roman Catholicism despite the risk of being ostracized by their Muslim neighbors.

Marin Sopi, 67, a retired Albanian language teacher who was baptized 16 years ago, said his family has been “closet Catholic” for generations. He recalled that during his childhood, he and his family celebrated Ramadan with Muslim friends but secretly celebrated Christmas at home.

“We are Muslims by day and Christians by night,” he said. He said that since publicly embracing Christianity, 36 members of his extended family have officially renounced Islam.

Islam and Christianity in Kosovo mostly coexisted peacefully – until Orthodox Christian soldiers and nationalist paramilitary gangs from Serbia began burning down mosques and expelled Muslims from their homes in the 1990s.

Foreign Christian missionaries have kept their distance from Kosovo’s conversion campaign. But some ethnic Albanians living in Western Europe have offered support, seeing a return to Catholicism as Kosovo’s best hope of one day joining the European Union, a largely Christians.

Arber Gashi, an ethnic Albanian living in Switzerland, traveled to Kosovo to attend a baptism at the church in Llapushnik, which overlooks the scene of a major 1998 battle between Serb forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army.

He and other activists worry that funding for mosque construction and other activities comes from Türkiye as well as countries in the Middle East such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, with approaches more conservative, would threaten Kosovo’s traditional comfortable form of Islam. Most of this money is used for economic development projects unrelated to religion.

Central Pristina has a statue honoring Mother Teresa, the Catholic nun and Nobel Peace Prize laureate of Albanian descent, and is dominated by a large Roman Catholic church built after the war with Serbia. But Türkiye is now financing the construction nearby of a huge new and even larger mosque.

Mr. Gashi also said he feared a return to the Islamist extremism that emerged during Kosovo’s chaotic first decade of independence. According to some calculations, Kosovo supplies more recruits to the Islamic State in Syria than any other European country.

On the other hand, Christianity will open the way to Europe, he said.

A government crackdown in recent years has silenced extremism and reinforced Kosovo’s traditionally relaxed attitude toward Islam. The streets of Pristina are lined with bars serving a wide variety of alcohol. Veiled women are extremely rare.

Gezim Gjin Hajrullahu, 57, a teacher among those recently baptized in Llapushnik, said he joined the Catholic church “not because of religion” but “because of our national identity.” us” as ethnic Albanians. His wife also converted.

Kosovo’s Albanian Prime Minister Albin Kurti, in an interview in Pristina, downplayed the importance of religion to Albanian identity. “For us, religions come and go but we are still here,” he said. “For Albanians, in terms of identity, religion has never been of primary importance.”

That set them apart from other ethnic groups in the now-vanished multi-ethnic Yugoslav federal state, which disintegrated in the Balkan wars of the early 1990s. The main belligerents in the early stages of the The conflict speaks many of the same languages ​​and looks similar but is clearly distinguished from each other by religion – the Serbs are Orthodox Christians, the Croats are Roman Catholic and the Bosnians are Muslim.

Activists in the return movement believe that ethnic Albanians also need to reinforce their loyalty to their nation with religion in the form of Roman Catholicism.

Boik Breca, a former Muslim active in the movement, emphasized that the Catholic church is not an alien intrusion but a true expression of Albanian identity and proof that Kosovo belongs Europe.

He said he became interested in Christianity when Kosovo, along with Serbia, was still part of Yugoslavia. He was sent to prison off the coast of Croatia as a political prisoner. Many of his fellow inmates were Catholic, he recalls, and helped inspire what he now considers his true faith and the belief that “our ancestors were all Catholic.”

“To be a true Albanian, you must be a Christian,” he said.

This view is widely disputed, including by Mr. Kurti, the prime minister.

“I don’t buy that,” he said.

The current push against Islam began with a meeting in October 2023 in Decani, a bastion of nationalist sentiment near Kosovo’s border with Albania. The gathering, attended by nationalist intellectuals and veterans of the Kosovo Liberation Army, discussed ways to promote “Albanianness” and decided that Christianity would help.

“Today we are no longer Muslims,” said the attendees speakadopted the slogan: “Just Albanians.”

The meeting led to the formation of what was initially called the Movement for Renunciation of the Islamic Faith, a provocative name that was later largely abandoned in favor of the “Movement of Return.”

From his office in Pristina, decorated in the Mecca model, Kosovo’s grand mufti, Naim Ternava, watched the return movement with anxiety and dismay. Pushing Muslims to convert to Christianity, he said, risks disrupting religious harmony and is being “used by foreign agents to spread hatred of Islam.”

“Our mission is to keep people following our religion,” he added. I tell everyone to continue practicing Islam.”