An outsize Italianate building at the heart of Pristina’s concrete cityscape — whose consecration was attended by Kosovo’s president, Hashim Thaçi, and an Albanian representative of the Vatican — the building is not just a religious monument; it’s also rich in political symbolism.
The project was championed by the late former President Ibrahim Rugova, who led Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority in a campaign of resistance against Serbian repression in the 1990s.
For Rugova, the cathedral — towering over the corner where a street named for Bill Clinton meets one named for George W. Bush — is a way of signaling to Europe that its newest country, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, is open and tolerant.
With one of the highest rates per capita of citizens signed up to radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, Kosovo is eager to prove to the rest of Europe that its Muslim-majority population is nothing to worry about, and that it peacefully co-exists alongside its Christian counterpart. [...]
A high school was razed to make space for it, forcing students to relocate to others on the city’s outskirts. The cathedral also received pride of place in the city center, while requests for land to build a new central mosque were initially rejected.
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