This never works the other way, of course. Islamic Tolerance Alert from Balkanalysis.com (thanks to Insubria):
When government officials in Macedonia recently proposed rebuilding a church that once stood on the city”s central square, they received an abrupt warning: for the Islamic Community (IVZ), the recreation of Sveti Konstanin & Elena, destroyed in the 1963 earthquake, should guarantee them their own right to build a mosque in the prominent downtown area.
According to a report from A1 Television, among its other ambitions the IVZ is most keen on rebuilding the Burmali Mosque, destroyed in 1925, a year after the official dissolution of the Ottoman Empire but 12 years after the Ottomans were finally expelled, following a long period of bloody crackdowns on the Christian populations of Macedonia. A Royalist Yugoslav army house was built over it. Today the area is near a pedestrianized street where modern cafés cater to locals and international guests, considered to be one of the nicest modernization efforts in the city in recent years. Resurrecting a mosque in the area would certainly change the ambience.
Interestingly, it appears that the whole building frenzy is part of the larger issue of creating an “urban plan” for Skopje. 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 Macedonia.
Read it all.