\n<\/p>\n
The Catholic priest stood at the altar in the hilltop church for the mass baptism, dunking dozens of heads in water and tracing a cross with his finger on each forehead.<\/p>\n
Then he rejoiced at Christianity\u2019s recovery of souls in a land where the vast majority of people are Muslim \u2014 as the men, women and children standing before him had been.<\/p>\n
The ceremony was one of many in recent months in Kosovo, a formerly Serbian territory inhabited largely by ethnic Albanians that declared itself an independent state in 2008. In a census last spring, 93 percent of the population professed itself Muslim and only 1.75 percent Roman Catholic.<\/p>\n
A small number of ethnic Albanian Christian activists, all converts from Islam, are urging their ethnic kin to look to the church as an expression of their identity. They call it the \u201creturn movement,\u201d a push to revive a pre-Islamic past they see as an anchor of Kosovo\u2019s place in Europe and a barrier to religious extremism spilling over from the Middle East.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Until the Ottoman Empire conquered what is today Kosovo and other areas of the Balkans in the 14th century, bringing with it Islam, ethnic Albanians were primarily Catholics. Under Ottoman rule, which lasted until 1912, most of Kosovo\u2019s people switched faiths.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
By reversing that process, said Father Fran Kolaj, the priest who carried out the baptisms outside the village of Llapushnik, ethnic Albanians can recover their original identity.<\/p>\n
Ethnic Albanians, who trace their roots to an ancient people called the Illyrians, live mainly in Albania, a country on the Adriatic Sea. But they also make up a large majority of the population in neighboring Kosovo and more than a quarter of the population in North Macedonia.<\/p>\n
At the church where the baptisms took place, nationalist emblems jostle with religious iconography. The double-headed eagle symbol of Albania decorates the steeple and also a screen behind the altar.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cIt is time for us to return to the place where we belong \u2014 with Christ,\u201d Father Kolaj said in an interview.<\/p>\n
In many Muslim lands, renouncing Islam can bring severe punishment, sometimes even death. So far, the baptism ceremonies taking place in Kosovo have stirred no violent opposition, though there have been some angry denunciations online. (It is not known how many conversions have so far taken place.)<\/p>\n
But historians, who agree that Christianity was present in Kosovo long before the Ottoman Empire brought Islam, question the thinking behind the movement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cFrom a historical perspective what they say is true,\u201d said Durim Abdullahu, a historian at the University of Pristina. But, he added, \u201ctheir logic means that we should all become pagans\u201d because the people living on the territory of today\u2019s Kosovo before the arrival of Christianity and later Islam were nonbelievers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Like many other Kosovars, Mr. Abdullahu said he believed that Serbia, which has a mostly Orthodox Christian population, had helped stoke the return movement as a way of sowing discord in Kosovo. While Serbia has long been accused of undermining Kosovo\u2019s stability<\/a>, there is no evidence it has been promoting the conversions.<\/p>\n Archaeologists in 2022 uncovered the remains 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 perhaps related to them, were Christians.<\/p>\n Still, Christophe Goddard, a French archaeologist working at the site, said it was wrong to impose modern concepts of nation and ethnicity on ancient peoples. \u201cThis is not history but modern politics,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Traces of Kosovo\u2019s distant pre-Islamic past also survived in a small number of families that clung to Roman Catholicism despite the risk of being ostracized by their Muslim neighbors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Marin Sopi, 67, a retired Albanian language teacher who was baptized 16 years ago, said his family had been \u201ccloset Catholics\u201d for generations. In childhood, he recalled, he and his family observed Ramadan with Muslim friends but secretly celebrated Christmas at home.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were Muslims during the day and Christians at night,\u201d he said. Since coming out as a Christian, he said, 36 members of his extended family have formally abandoned Islam.<\/p>\n Islam and Christianity in Kosovo mostly coexisted in peace \u2014 until Orthodox Christian soldiers and nationalist paramilitary gangs from Serbia began torching mosques and expelling Muslims from the homes in the 1990s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Foreign Christian missionaries have kept their distance from Kosovo\u2019s conversion campaign. But some ethnic Albanians living in Western Europe have offered support, seeing a return to Catholicism as Kosovo\u2019s best hope of one day entering the European Union, a largely Christian club.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Arber Gashi, an ethnic Albanian living in Switzerland, traveled to Kosovo to attend the baptism ceremony at the church in Llapushnik, which overlooks the scene of a major battle in 1998 between Serb forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army.<\/p>\n He and other activists worry that funding for mosque-building and other activities from Turkey and countries in the Middle East like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, with their more conservative approaches, threatens Kosovo\u2019s traditionally laid-back form of Islam. Most of this money has gone into economic development projects unrelated to religion.<\/p>\n The center of 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 cathedral built after the war with Serbia. But Turkey is currently funding the construction nearby of a giant new mosque that will be even bigger.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Gashi also said that he feared a return of the Islamic extremism that emerged in Kosovo\u2019s first, chaotic decade of independence. By some counts,<\/a> Kosovo provided more recruits to the Islamic State in Syria than any other European country.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Christianity, on the other hand, would open a path to Europe, he said.<\/p>\n A crackdown by the authorities in recent years has silenced extremism and reinforced Kosovo\u2019s traditionally relaxed take on Islam. The streets of Pristina are lined with bars serving a wide range of alcohol. Veiled women are extremely rare.<\/p>\n Gezim Gjin Hajrullahu, 57, a teacher who was among those baptized recently in Llapushnik, said he had joined the Catholic church \u201cnot for the sake of religion itself\u201d but for the \u201csake of our national identity\u201d as ethnic Albanians. His wife also converted.<\/p>\n Kosovo\u2019s ethnic Albanian prime minister, Albin Kurti, in an interview in Pristina, played down the importance of religion to Albanian identity. \u201cFor us, religions came and went but we are still here,\u201d he said. \u201cFor Albanians, in terms of identity, religion was never of first importance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That sets them apart from other peoples in the now vanished, multiethnic federal state of Yugoslavia, which disintegrated during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s. The main warring parties in the early phases of the conflict spoke much the same language and looked similar but were clearly distinguished from one another by religion \u2014 Serbs by Orthodox Christianity, Croats by Roman Catholicism and Bosnians by Islam.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Activists in the return movement believe that ethnic Albanians also need to cement their national loyalties with religion in the form of Roman Catholicism.<\/p>\n Boik Breca, a former Muslim active in the movement, insisted that the Catholic church is not an alien intrusion but the true expression of Albanian identity and evidence that Kosovo belongs in Europe.<\/p>\n He said his interest in Christianity began when Kosovo, along with Serbia, was still part of Yugoslavia. He was sent to jail off the coast of Croatia as a political prisoner. Many of his fellow inmates were Catholics, he recalled, and helped stir what he now sees as his true faith and a belief that \u201cour ancestors were all Catholics.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cTo be a true Albanian,\u201d he said, \u201cyou have to be Christian.\u201d<\/p>\n This view is widely disputed, including by Mr. Kurti, the prime minister.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI don\u2019t buy that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The current push against Islam began with a meeting in October 2023 in Decani, a bastion of nationalist sentiment near Kosovo\u2019s border with Albania. The gathering, attended by nationalist intellectuals and former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters, discussed ways to promote \u201cAlbanian-ness\u201d and decided that Christianity would help.<\/p>\n