Saintly Spirit Remembered, in a Truly Balkan Way
By IAN FISHER
KOPJE, Macedonia, Aug. 1 — Mother Teresa will soon become a saint. But this celebration of the divine in a human being has turned out to be as good a moment as any to fight about all the worldly things that usually get fought about in the Balkans: namely, religion, ethnicity and history.
The conflict centers on an attempt, so far unsuccessful, to donate a statue of Mother Teresa to the city of Rome. It is a simple enough dispute on one level, but on another it reflects the enduring strains that have made it so hard to stitch together Balkan societies.
The tale begins with a solitary fact that no one, mercifuly, disputes: Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, who became the world's most famous Roman Catholic missionary, universally known as Mother Teresa, was born in August 1910 here in Skopje. (As for the exact date, some say she was born on Aug. 26, others Aug. 27.)
The city was then an especially mixed corner of the Ottoman Empire, home to Turks, Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Gypsies, Jews, Vlachs and Albanians, which is what Mother Teresa always said she was.
After Mother Teresa's death in 1997, one of Macedonia's most famous artists, Tome Serafimovski, fashioned a nine-foot bronze statue of her that now stands in downtown Skopje. As the Vatican moved to make her a saint, Mr. Serafimovski decided to donate a copy to Rome. Its delivery was to coincide with her expected beatification, the last step before sainthood, in October.
The intention, he said, was pure: "Mother Teresa was well known all over the world," he said. "She is from our city. She is a Nobel Prize winner."
But then last month, an Albanian newspaper here, Fakti, carried a sensational scoop: the statue, it reported from Italy, was to have an inscription identifying her as "a Macedonian daughter."
Albanian leaders were outraged. This was an attempt, they said, by the Macedonians to claim Mother Teresa as one of their own. The inscription, one Albanian political party charged, "undermines the Albanian national identity and represents usurpation of Mother Teresa's origin."
Ethnic Albanians make up perhaps a quarter, though some say a third or more, of Macedonia's two million people. (No one knows for certain and, like much else, it is argued over bitterly.)
The largest national group here are often considered Slavs. But many Macedonians contend hotly that they are in fact not Slavs, but descended from ancient Macedonians like Alexander the Great. Whatever their descent, they fought a brief war with ethnic Albanians in 2001.
Mother Teresa has now emerged as yet another strain in this larger national tug of war.
What complicates matters further is that Mother Teresa was Roman Catholic, while most Albanians are Muslim, and this has opened a crack for speculation about Mother Teresa's actual ethnic roots.
Jasmina Mironski, a prominent Macedonian journalist who has written two books on Mother Teresa, says there is no doubt that Mother Teresa's own mother, Dranafila Bernaj, was ethnic Albanian. But as far as her father, Nikola Bojaxhiu, goes, "He is the tricky combination."
She says the "u" that ends his name made him more likely a Vlach, a non-Slavic Orthodox people also called Walachians. Plus, she said, Mother Teresa "didn't speak Albanian, that's for sure; she only knew five words of Albanian."
Moreover, her brother's name was Lazar, the name of Serbia's most famous prince. "It's very Serbian, to be frank," she said.
This is heresy to Albanians, who say they have been repeatedly persecuted by Serbs.
The debate has leached out from Macedonia to intellectuals in Albania proper, who in July wrote in anger to the mayor of Rome urging him to resist the effort "to usurp the figure and deeds of Mother Teresa," as well as to Internet chat rooms read by Macedonians around the world.
"Mother Teresa was a Vlach from Macedonia," one Macedonian writer posted smugly on a Web site. "Never a Shiptar," a derogatory term for Albanians.
All sides say, naturally, that their only interest is to see Mother Teresa's life celebrated, but with the maximum truth possible.
"The whole world knows the pope is Polish," said Sulejman Rushiti, vice president of the Democratic Party of Albanians. "And if someone would say he was some other nationality, the Poles would be offended."
With the argument still raging, Risto Penov, the mayor of Skopje, who is overseeing the donation of the statue, noted that no one ever said Mother Teresa was Macedonian, just perhaps not 100 percent Albanian (Mr. Penov, who is Macedonian, also says she could not speak Albanian.)
Moreover, he said, there was never a plan for an inscription that mentioned a "Macedonian daughter." He said the idea is now the same as it always was, for an inscription that reads simply: "Born Skopje 26 August 1910. Died Calcutta 5 September 1997."
"Now we have a person who can put us together again — and we're dividing ourselves," he said. But the editors at Fakti insist that their report was right.
Dragging his hand across his nose, the artist, Mr. Serafimovski, said he had had it "up to here" with all the bickering. No statue will be donated, he said, until the issue is resolved. He opposes anything even hinting that Mother Teresa was Macedonian (even if he himself believes the father was Vlach).
At Mother Teresa's own order in Skopje, yet another view seemed to prevail about this woman who left Skopje at the age of 18. An Italian nun who declined to be identified said Mother Teresa unquestionably spoke Albanian, among other languages, but felt the strongest affinity with another part of the world entirely. "Most of her life, she spent in Calcutta," she declared. "She felt more Indian than any other citizenship."
