7 February 2008 | Tensions between various religious and ethnic groups in Macedonia are getting stirred up by several construction projects in the capital Skopje.

Most recently, opposition was voiced to the construction of an Eastern Orthodox church in the Macedonian capital’s central square, on the site of Mother Teresa’s birth home.

In a letter to Pope Benedict XVI, the leader of the Macedonian opposition party Democratic Union for Integration, Ali Ahmeti, called on the Vatican to forbid the Macedonian government to carry out its plans, national media reported on Thursday. Building the church, he argued, would cause a religious conflict.

Authorities intend to build the church near the former site of the St. Konstantin and Elena church that was destroyed in the 1963 earthquake, according to the Macedonian A1 news site, but it is yet unclear whether the new temple will be dedicated to them or to other saints.

And while Ahmeti claims the project will offend Mother Teresa’s memory, the religiously tolerant Albanian people and the multi-confessional nature of the Macedonian state, the country’s Islamic Community, IVZ, isn’t so diplomatic.

The IVZ says that the construction of the church “should guarantee them the right to build a mosque in the prominent downtown area,” Balkanalysis.com reported earlier. According to the publication, they are most keen on rebuilding the Burmali Mosque that was destroyed in 1925, following the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution.

“While building an Orthodox Church is largely an exercise in decoration in a country where few attend church regularly,” Balanalysis.com noted, “building a mosque, frequented five times a day by groups of Muslims likely to be “commuting” across the bridge from the “other” side of the river, is not.”

The media also mentions another thorn in the side of the Islamic community, namely the Holocaust Memorial Centre that will be completed by the Macedonian Jewish Community later this year in Skopje’s former Jewish quarter.

After disintegration of Yugoslavia, the nternational community has assisted Macedonia to become an ethnically and religiously diverse state, but it seems the spirit of celebrating this diversity is yet to come.