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nterestingly, it appears that the whole building frenzy is part of the larger issue of creating an “urban plan” for

. The government has announced it will put forward an international tender for coming up with a “solution” to this issue, which it says will involve architects, planners and officials from the Ministry of Culture. However, the religious dimensions of the urban upgrade means that the authorities are playing with fire. While building an Orthodox Church is largely an exercise in decoration in a country where few attend church regularly, 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. Considering current demographic and social trends, such religious one-upsmanship cannot lead to a long-term victory, to put it mildly, for Christendom in .

This is not the first time that Muslim officials have raised their voices on this issue; it has been a hot topic for several years now. And in interviews and public statements, the ambitions of the Islamic leadership to restore the Ottoman-era landscape have been clearly seen. The A1 article quotes an IVZ official who states that the Islamic Community had put forward the request to rebuild the Burmali Mosque “one year ago.” Communist Yugoslavia did away with other some surviving mosques, converting them into spaces for public use, as had its Royalist predecessor.

Forces at work within

’s Muslim community have therefore sought to take power into their own hands. Unlike the officials who merely proposed rebuilding the central church, Muslims have simply gone ahead with the philosophy of build first, ask questions later. A Macedonian journalist interested in asking builders about a mosque that was being constructed in a Christian majority neighborhood of two years ago was threatened at gunpoint. Islamic officials controlling funds from letting properties and for building works have been associated with the radical Wahhabi movement in the past, and tend to be very secretive.

The suspicion that much of the new mosques are being built with Saudi money is evidenced in places such as the

, just west of the capital, where one garish mosque adorned with Saudi-style double minarets stands besides the highway; another is currently under construction adjacent to it. When asked about the source of funding for the former mosque, a local imam stated that it had all been accomplished through local donations- the usual, and impossible to verify, response in such cases.

hat Islamic groups are not interested just in reviving Ottoman architecture has been witnessed in numerous ways. A mob of Muslim youth, officially criticized by the IVZ, protested against the Danish cartoons of Mohammed back when that controversy was playing out across

in February of 2006. More recently, on 10 January Muslim women petitioned successfully for the right to wear head scarves in official photographs. According to Balkan Insight, an obscure women’s association, ‘Islam and Science’ had filed a complaint in November 2007, claiming that “the ban violated the right to freely express religion.”

Further, as was witnessed in 2006, local sources in Struga, on Lake Ohrid in Macedonia’s southwest, recently stated for Balkanalysis.com that a Wahhabi ‘beach party’ in July, “twice as big as the year before,” brought around 100 bearded men and youth to the beach for a day of football, conversation and casual religion. While undercover police snapped photos, however, the bizarre occurrence was not reported in the media.

The issue of building a single church in

cannot, therefore, be removed from the larger context of heightened religious, rather than ethnic oppositions in society at large. In the end, while some commentators surveyed by the Macedonian media see the center-right government as merely promoting its own political interests in the plan to rebuild Sveti Konstantin & Elena, it may ironically be, in the long-term, the interests of the Islamic Community that end up being served, as the quiet struggle for the future of a country with both a Byzantine and Ottoman past heats up.