Religion in Eastern Europe February 2008 [antikvár]

INTER-CHURCH AND INTER-RELIGIOUS TENSIONS IN POST-COMMUNIST EASTERN EUROPE: THE CASE OF ALBANIA Ines Angeli Murzaku Ines Angeli Murzaku is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Seton Hall University in South Orange New Jersey, USA as viiell as a visiting professor at the University of Bologna and University of Calabria in Italy. Dr. Murzaku is an ecclesiastical historian focusing on Byzantine and modern Christianity. Dr. Murzaku has authored Catholicism, Culture and Conversion: The History of the Jesuits in Albania (1841-1946), published by Orientalia Christiana Analecta in 2006; and is the general editor of Quo Vadis Eastern Europe? Religion, State and Society after Communism, forthcoming by the University of Bologna in April 2008. Dr. Murzaku is currently the vice president of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), and an executive board member of Christians Associated for Relationships with Eastern Europe (CAREE). Introduction At the end of September 2006, I was invited to give a paper at the NATO advanced research vi^orkshop in the Albanian capital Tirana. The workshop's main focus was to strengthen and promote religious co-existence and tolerance for a more secure civil society in the Balkans and beyond. Among the invited speakers were Muslim, Bektashi, Orthodox, Jewish and Catholic religious leaders as well as scholars from United States, Israel, Italy, France, Austria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq. The conference was organized in a very historic place, the Albanian Museum of National History, which was built during the Enver Hoxha regime, but the pavilion of the icons where the NATO conference was held, did not exist during communism. In fact, the decorated iconostasis and forty eight Byzantine and post-Byzantine colorful icons dating from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries became part of the National Museum only in 1997, after the fall of communism. The day after the workshop concluded its deliberations, there was a press release by the director of the Millenium Club Center, Mr. Mentor Nazarko, a conference local organizer, explaining the conference's stand on Muslim issues.' The ' Nazarko, Mentor, Njoftim Shtypi, Zyra e Marredhenieve Publike té Qendres Millenium Club, Tirané, October 2, 2006, p. I. RELIGION IN EASTERN EUROPE XXVIII, 1 (February 2008) page 1