A move towards Christianity is stirring up Kosovo, a Muslim country

The New York Times

In front of the church's altar on the top of the hill, the Catholic priest performed baptisms, dipping dozens of heads into the water and marking a cross with his finger on each forehead.

He then expressed joy at the recovery of souls in Christianity, in a country where the overwhelming majority are Muslims – as had been the men, women, and children standing before him.

In recent months, the ceremony was one of many in Kosovo, a former territory under Serbia, inhabited mainly by ethnic Albanians that declared itself an independent state in 2008. In a spring census, 93 percent of the population declared themselves Muslim and only 1.75 percent Roman Catholic.

A small group of ethnic Albanian Christian activists, all converts from Islam, are urging their compatriots to see the church as an expression of their identity. They call it the "return movement," a push to revive a pre-Islamic past that they see as an anchor for Kosovo in Europe and a deterrent to religious extremism spreading from the Middle East.

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

By reversing that process, says Father Fran Kolaj, the priest who performed the baptisms outside the village of Llapushnik, ethnic Albanians can reclaim their original identity.

Ethnic Albanians, who trace their roots to an ancient Illyrian people, live mainly in Albania, a landlocked country on the Adriatic Sea. However, they also comprise most of the population in neighboring Kosovo and more than a quarter of the population in North Macedonia.

In the church where the baptisms took place, nationalist emblems clash with religious iconography. The double-headed eagle symbol of Albania adorns the bell tower and a platform behind the altar.

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

In many Muslim countries, renouncing Islam can bring severe punishment, sometimes even death. So far, the baptism ceremonies in Kosovo have not sparked violent opposition, although there have been some angry denunciations online. (It is unknown how many conversions have occurred so far.)

However, historians who agree that Christianity was present in Kosovo long before the Ottoman Empire brought Islam question the logic behind this movement for return.

“From a historical perspective, what they say is true,” said Durim Abdullahu, a historian at the University of Pristina. But, he added, “their logic would mean that we would all become pagans” because the people who lived in the territory of present-day Kosovo before the arrival of Christianity, and later Islam, were infidels.

Like many other Kosovars, Mr. Abdullahu said he believed that Serbia, which has a predominantly Orthodox Christian population, had helped fuel the return movement as a way to sow division in Kosovo. While Serbia has long been accused of undermining Kosovo’s stability, there is no evidence that it has promoted conversions.

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

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

Traces of Kosovo's distant pre-Islamic past also survived in a small number of families who clung to Roman Catholicism despite the risk of being expelled by their Muslim neighbors.

Marin Sopi, 67, a retired Albanian language teacher baptized 16 years ago, said his family had been “Catholic on the shelf” for generations. As a child, he recalls that his family celebrated Ramadan with Muslim friends but secretly celebrated Christmas at home.

“We were Muslims by day and Christians by night,” he said. Since he was born again as a Christian, he said, 36 members of his extended family have officially abandoned Islam.

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

Foreign Christian missionaries have kept their distance from the conversion campaign in Kosovo. 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 Christian club.

Arbër Gashi, an ethnic Albanian living in Switzerland, traveled to Kosovo to attend the baptism ceremony at the Llapushnik church, which overlooks a landscape where a major battle took place in 1998 between Serbian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army.

He and other activists worry that funding for mosque construction and other activities from Turkey and Middle Eastern countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, with their more conservative approaches, threatens Kosovo's traditionally peaceful form of Islam. Much of this money has gone to economic development projects unrelated to religion.

The center of Pristina has a statue honoring Mother Teresa, the Catholic nun and Nobel Peace Prize laureate of Albanian origin. It is dominated by a large Romanesque Catholic cathedral built after the war with Serbia. But Turkey is currently financing the construction nearby of a gigantic new mosque that will be even bigger.

Mr. Gashi also said he feared a return to the Islamic extremism that emerged in Kosovo's chaotic first decade of independence. By some accounts, Kosovo provided more recruits to the Islamic State in Syria than any other European country.

On the other hand, Christianity would open a path to Europe, he said.

A crackdown by the authorities in recent years has silenced extremism and reinforced Kosovo's traditionally relaxed stance on Islam. The streets of Pristina are lined with bars serving a wide range of alcohol. Women wearing headscarves are scarce.

Gezim Gjin Hajrullahu, 57, a teacher recently baptized in Llapushnik, said he had joined the Catholic church "not for the sake of religion itself" but for "the sake of our national identity" as ethnic Albanians. His wife also converted.

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

This sets them apart from other peoples in Yugoslavia's now-defunct, multiethnic federal state, which disintegrated during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s. The main warring parties in the early stages of the conflict spoke almost the same language. They looked similar but were clearly distinguished by religion - Serbs by Orthodox Christianity, Croats by Roman Catholicism, and Bosniaks by Islam.

Activists in the return movement believe that ethnic Albanians also need to cement their national allegiance with religion in the form of Roman Catholicism.

Boik Breca, a former Muslim active in the movement, insisted that the Catholic Church is not a foreign intervention but a true expression of Albanian identity and proof that Kosovo belongs to Europe.

He said his interest in Christianity began when Kosovo and Serbia were still part of Yugoslavia. He was sent to a prison off the coast of Croatia as a political prisoner. Many of his fellow prisoners were Catholic, he recalls, and this helped foster what he now sees as his true faith, and he believes that "our ancestors were all Catholics."

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

Mr. Kurti, the Prime Minister, widely disputes this view.

"I don't think so," he said.

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

"We are no longer Muslims from today," said those present, adopting the slogan: "Let us be only Albanians."

The meeting led to the formation of what was initially called the Movement for Abandoning the Islamic Faith, a provocative name that has since been dropped mainly in favor of the "Return Movement."

From his office in Pristina, decorated with a model of Mecca, Kosovo's grand mufti, Naim Ternava, has watched with anxiety and despair the return movement. The push for Muslims to convert to Christianity, he said, risked disrupting religious harmony and was being used by "foreign agents to spread hatred against Islam."

"Our mission," he added, "is to keep people in our religion. I tell people to stay in Islam."