The Catholic priest stood at the altar of the hilltop church for the mass baptism, dipping dozens of heads into water and tracing a cross with his finger on each forehead.
Then he rejoiced in Christianity’s recovery of souls in a land where the vast majority of people are Muslim – as had been the men, women and children who stood before him.
The ceremony was one of many held in recent months in Kosovo, a former Serbian territory inhabited largely by ethnic Albanians that declared itself an independent state in 2008. In a census last spring, 93% of the population said they were Muslim and only 1.75% Roman Catholic. .
A small number of ethnic Albanian Christian activists, all converts from Islam, are urging their ethnic relatives 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 of Kosovo’s position in Europe and a barrier 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 them, Albanians were primarily Catholic. Under Ottoman rule, which lasted until 1912, most of Kosovo’s population changed their faith.
By reversing this process, said Father Fran Kolaj, the priest who performed the baptisms outside the village of Llapushnik, Albanians can recover their original identity.
Ethnic Albanians, who trace their roots to an ancient people called Illyrians, live mainly in Albania, a country on the Adriatic Sea. But they also make up the vast majority of the population of neighboring Kosovo and more than a quarter of the population of North Macedonia.
In the church where the baptisms took place, nationalist emblems clash with religious iconography. The double-headed eagle, symbol of Albania, decorates the bell tower and also a screen behind the altar.
“It’s time for us to return to where we belong – with Christ,” Father Fran Kolaj said in an interview.
In many Muslim countries, renouncing Islam can lead to severe punishment, sometimes even death. So far, the naming ceremonies that have taken place in Kosovo have not sparked any violent opposition, although there have been some angry denunciations online. (It is not known how many conversions have occurred so far.)
But historians, who agree that Christianity was present in Kosovo long before the Ottoman Empire brought Islam, question the thinking behind the movement.
“From a historical perspective what they say is true,” said Durim Abdullahu, a historian at the University of Pristina. But, he added, “their logic means that we should all become pagans” because the inhabitants who lived on the territory of today’s Kosovo before the arrival of Christianity and then Islam were non-believers.
Like many other Kosovars, Abdullahu said he believes Serbia, which has a predominantly Orthodox Christian population, helped fuel the return movement as a way to sow discord in Kosovo. Although Serbia has long been accused of undermining Kosovo’s stability, there is no evidence that it promoted conversions.
Archaeologists in 2022 discovered the remains of a 6th-century Roman church near Pristina, and in 2023 found a mosaic with an inscription indicating that the early Albanians, or at least a people possibly related to them, were Christians.
However, Christophe Goddard, a French archaeologist working at the site, said it was wrong to impose modern concepts of nation and ethnicity on ancient peoples. “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 adhered to Roman Catholicism despite the risk of being ostracized by their Muslim neighbors.
Marin Sopi, 67, a retired Albanian language teacher who was baptized 16 years ago, said his family had been “secretly Catholic” for generations. As a child, he recalled, he and his family observed Ramadan with Muslim friends but secretly celebrated Christmas at home.
“We were Muslims by day and Christians by night,” he said. Since he declared himself a Christian, he said, 36 members of his extended family have formally abandoned Islam.
Islam and Christianity coexisted mostly peacefully in Kosovo until Orthodox Christian soldiers and Serbian nationalist paramilitary gangs began torching mosques and expelling Muslims from homes in the 1990s.
Foreign Christian missionaries have kept their distance from Kosovo’s conversion campaign. But some Albanians living in Western Europe have offered support, seeing the return to Catholicism as Kosovo’s best hope of one day joining the European Union, a largely Christian club.
Arber Gashi, an ethnic Albanian living in Switzerland, traveled to Kosovo to participate in the baptism ceremony at the Llapushnik church, which overlooks the scene of a major battle in 1998 between Serbian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army .
He and other activists fear that funding for mosque construction and other activities from Turkey and Middle Eastern countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, with their more conservative approaches, threatens Kosovo’s traditionally relaxed form of Islam. Most of this money went to economic development projects not related to religion.
Central Pristina has a statue honoring Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun and Nobel Peace Prize winner of Albanian origin, and is dominated by a large Roman Catholic cathedral built after the war with Serbia. But Turkey is currently funding the construction of a giant new mosque nearby that will be even bigger.
Gashi also said he feared a return of the Islamic extremism that emerged in Kosovo’s first chaotic decade of independence. By some calculations, Kosovo has provided more recruits to the Islamic State in Syria than any other European country.
Christianity, however, would pave the way to Europe, he said.
Crackdowns by authorities in recent years have silenced extremism and strengthened Kosovo’s traditionally relaxed approach to Islam. The streets of Pristina are lined with bars serving a wide range of alcohol. Veiled women are extremely rare.
Gezim Gjin Hajrullahu, 57, a teacher who was among those recently baptized in Llapushnik, said he joined the Catholic church “not for the sake of religion itself” but for “the sake of our national identity” as an ethnic Albanian. His wife also converted.
Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian prime minister, Albin Kurti, downplayed the importance of religion to Albanian identity in an interview in Pristina. “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 distinguishes them from other peoples of the now defunct multi-ethnic federal state of Yugoslavia, which disintegrated during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s. The main warring parties in the early stages of the conflict spoke more or less the same language and looked similar, but were clearly distinguished from each other by religion: the Serbs by Orthodox Christianity, the Croats by Roman Catholicism, and the Bosnians by Islam .
Activists of the return movement believe that Albanians must also consolidate their national loyalty with religion in the form of Roman Catholicism.
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 proof that Kosovo belongs in Europe.
He said his interest in Christianity began when Kosovo, together with Serbia, was still part of Yugoslavia. He was sent to prison off the Croatian coast as a political prisoner. Many of his cellmates were Catholic, he recalled, and helped inspire what he now sees as his true faith and belief that “our ancestors were all Catholic.”
“To be a true Albanian,” he said, “you have to be Christian.”
This view is widely contested, including by Kurti, the prime minister.
“I don’t believe it,” he said.
The current push against Islam began with a meeting in October 2023 in Decani, a bastion of nationalist sentiment near Kosovo’s border with Albania. The meeting, which was attended by nationalist intellectuals and former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters, discussed ways to promote “Albanianness” and it was decided that Christianity would help.
“From today we are no longer Muslims,” said the participants, adopting the slogan: “Being only Albanians.”
The meeting led to the formation of what was initially called the Movement for the Abandonment of the Islamic Faith, a provocative name later largely abandoned 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 the return movement with anxiety and dismay. The push for Muslims to convert to Christianity, he said, risks disrupting religious harmony and is being used by “foreign agents to spread hatred of Islam.”
“Our mission,” he added, “is to keep people in our religion. I tell people to stay in Islam.”