Plans to Build Controversial Macedonia Church Scrapped

The latest changes are according to plans done by the central municipality, though it remains unclear whether this represents a change of heart by the government. The mayor of the central municipality and the majority in the municipality's councilors comes from the ranks of the ruling VMRO DPMNE party.

Last year, the announced building of the state funded church was a hot topic that threatened to deteriorate into worsening ethnic and religious relations between the Macedonian majority with mainly Orthodox Christian beliefs and the approximately one quarter Albanian population, who are mostly Muslim.  

The Islamic religious community and some ethnic Albanian NGO’s warned that if the government builds the church as it initially announced, they would be discriminated against. They demanded equal treatment and asked for a mosque to be built just opposite the church.

The opposition parties claimed that building a religious object with state money goes against the secular constitution. After this, the government gave the land to the Macedonian Orthodox Church thus avoiding confrontations with the country's Constitutional Court.

Others, mainly architecture students from Skopje's University, said that the church would represent a blot on the landscape, as it would not fit into the architectural look of the main square. They argued that the lot allocated for the church should remain empty as it offers pedestrians easy access to the square.