Sitting in a cafeteria in her middle-class neighbourhood of Ilioupoli, 43-year-old Anna Stamou says she soon hopes to be praying with her family at the new Athens mosque.
“I’ll perform a duaa [prayer] for children caught in war – to make all the wars to stop,” says Stamou, a mother-of-two and a PR consultant based in the Greek capital, Athens. “That’s what I pray for daily, but in the mosque, prayers are supposed to multiply,” adds Stamou, who converted to Islam a few years ago.
After years of praying in old warehouses and basements, Athens’ Muslims hope that despite protests by the far-right, the government will stick to its plan to build a mosque. Athens is the last remaining European capital without one.
Greece was under Ottoman rule for nearly four centuries until the early 1800s. If built, the mosque will be the first state-funded one since then.
It is expected to accommodate more than 350 worshipers and will be built in place of a 600 square metre former navy warehouse in the Votanikos neighbourhood of western Athens.
The complex will also feature a fountain for people to follow the ritual cleansing before praying.
“It’s not going to be anything special,” says Naim Elghandour, 62, president of the Muslim Association of Greece and Stamou’s husband.
“But it is important because it’s going to be the first official mosque with an official imam. Until now, the imams have been volunteers and that was dangerous, but we have been lucky and nothing bad happened in Greece to upset the relationships between Christians and Muslims.”
Many non-Muslim Athenians agree that a mosque must be built.
“We’re a democracy and there has to be freedom of religion,” says Aggeliki Anagnostopoulou, 62, a retiree living near the site of the upcoming mosque. “Why should I be worried, anyway? Being a Muslim doesn’t mean you’re an extremist.”
According to the Muslim Association of Greece, there are more than 100 unofficial mosques scattered throughout Athens for the estimated 200,000 Muslims living in the capital, most though are housed in basements or warehouses.
A law was passed in 2006 permitting the building of the new mosque. But this was challenged by those who oppose it. Now, after a decade of negotiations, Stamou and Elghandour are hopeful that it will finally be implemented and their religious freedoms will be recognised.
Earlier this year, the government awarded a contract to a consortium of construction companies to build the mosque at a cost of a million euros ($1.05m).
Construction was delayed after a far-right group occupied the warehouse for five-months with the aim of creating a Greek-only homeless shelter and blocking the building of the mosque. The sit-in ended after they were arrested by police in early November.
The setback was nothing new for the Muslim community of Athens: Far-right groups have attacked dozens of makeshift mosques in Athens over the past five years, including one incident in which suspects locked dozens of worshipers inside a prayer hall and set it on fire.
“If a mosque is finally built, we’ll be happy, but our excitement is gone,” Stamou says. “It’s been 10 years of waiting and 10 years of cheap and petty politics.”
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