Cathedral of Saint Mother Teresa: the only cathedral in the world named for her, though she is not recorded as ever having visited the city

In Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, the first stone of the cathedral of Saint Mother Teresa was laid in August 2005 by the first president of Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova, himself a Muslim. The government approved the project in 2007, and the works, entrusted to the Italian architect Livio Sterlicchio, went ahead in a neo-Romanesque style, with two-tone bands inspired by the medieval churches that preceded the Islamisation of Kosovo. A partial opening, with the building still unfinished, was held on 5 September 2010, on the thirteenth anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa, an occasion on which the building was targeted by Islamist graffiti. The formal consecration followed only on 5 September 2017, twenty years after her death and a year after her canonisation, with the Albanian cardinal Ernest Simoni present as the envoy of Pope Francis, not the pope himself, who has never visited Kosovo, as none of his predecessors did. The exact dimensions of the building remain uncertain: a bell tower given as between 70 and 76 metres depending on the source, and a capacity of about a thousand faithful according to a single unverified tourist source. So does the description, widely repeated but never independently checked, of the «largest cathedral in the Balkans». The pontifical organisation Aid to the Church in Need states that it contributed 1.4 million euros in four stages between 2007 and 2016, while the overall cost of the work is not documented elsewhere. The dedication to Mother Teresa reflects her family origins, which go back to Prizren and Gjakova in Kosovo, although she was born in Skopje in 1910. No source consulted documents a personal visit by her to Pristina or to Kosovo in her lifetime, a detail not to be taken for granted. In a country with a Muslim majority of about 90 per cent, and a Catholic minority estimated at around 3 per cent of the population, the size of the cathedral drew criticism from some, judged out of proportion to the small Catholic community, as several independent sources report. The consecration ceremony of 2017 also saw, according to several sources, the participation of Orthodox representatives and of the Kosovar Islamic community, a more nuanced picture of isolated friction and interfaith participation together. The Holy See still does not recognise Kosovo as a sovereign state, and since 2011 has kept only an apostolic delegate there rather than a nuncio. The apostolic administration of Prizren, erected in 2000, was raised to the diocese of Prizren-Pristina on 5 September 2018, led by Bishop Dodë Gjergji, in office at least as far as the most recent sources found go.