Residents of Kaliningrad object to the construction of a mosque in their city

There is still no mosque in Kaliningrad, although the local Muslim community has been asking the city authorities since 1993 to allocate a plot of land for construction. However, none of the proposed options for the location of the mosque was accepted. “Wherever we move the site for the construction of a mosque, ” ​​Kaliningrad Mayor Yury Savenko told an Izvestia correspondent, “there is the same problem everywhere. Citizens immediately write categorical letters. There have been cases when cultural figures and journalists join the signatories. One gets the feeling that someone is stirring up these moods. In our multinational city, which was populated in the post-war years by representatives of all nationalities and religions of the republics of the Union, this could not have happened before."

Izvestia quotes from one such letter of protest: "We kindly ask you to move the construction of the mosque to a quieter and undeveloped part, 2-3 km from the city limits." One of the townspeople, who put her signature under the appeal to the mayor's office, stated bluntly: "I don't want to hear these cries from the minaret five times a day." And the argument that the call to prayer would be pronounced in the mosque itself, as is customary among Sunnis, to whom Kaliningrad Muslims consider themselves, did not convince her: "I don't want to anyway. This is our city, Russian and Orthodox."

“We understand that the attitude towards us is an echo of the war in Chechnya,” commented 80-year-old Khakim Bikteev, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, the religious leader of the Muslims of the Kaliningrad region. millions of followers of the Koran. But it is unlikely that the feeling of an outcast will contribute to the resolution of this conflict. Where there is no place for official Islam, a scoundrel will always appear who will speculate on this, propagandizing Wahhabism in the underground."

On the eve of Defender of the Fatherland Day, leaflets protesting against the construction of a mosque appeared on the streets of Kaliningrad. “What is an Islamic center? flyer. On whose initiative this appeal was distributed among the townspeople, it is not reported.

At the end of March, residents of the Moskovsky district of Kaliningrad found in their mailboxes a new anonymous letter calling against the construction of a mosque. “Since our population is overwhelmingly Orthodox,” the letter says, “the construction of a Muslim prayer building in the center of the city is unacceptable. And the size of it should be proportional to the small number of religious (religious!) Muslims who live here.” The authors of the appeal again recall Volgodonsk and Buynaksk and ask the question: "Do these people need a mosque for prayer?" The letter ends with a call: "Let's gather our strength and no longer ask, but demand that evil be prevented from entering our city!"

Kaliningrad Mayor Yury Savenko said he was outraged by this appeal. "If they manage to find those who wrote it," he said, "I will do everything to bring them to justice for inciting ethnic hatred."

Reporting this, the Novye Izvestia newspaper draws attention to the position of the Russian Orthodox Church on this issue and quotes Bishop Seraphim (Melkonyan) of the Baltic at a meeting of the City Council: “What Muslims plan to build is not only a mosque, but also a spiritual center "No, we do not oppress Muslims. And we do not object to the construction of a modest mosque. But only somewhere on the outskirts of the city. And its size should be proportional to the number of believers in Allah." At the same time, the bishop turned to the mayor's office with a request to install a worship cross on the site where the mosque is supposed to be built - supposedly there used to be an Orthodox monastery. “The old-timers were greatly surprised by this appeal,” the newspaper writes, “they firmly remember that there was a Lutheran church at this place, blown up in 1972 ...”

At the same time, Novye Izvestia compares the protests against the construction of a mosque in Kaliningrad with the well-known scandals caused by plans to build a Hare Krishna temple in Moscow (cf. also the position of the Russian Orthodox Church on this issue) and a Catholic monastery in Nizhny Novgorod.

Sources

• Stulov I. “I don’t want to listen to these cries from the minaret five times a day”: Kaliningrad residents do not allow the construction of a mosque // News. 2004. February 10.
• Kaliningrad. Citizens protest against the construction of a mosque // Kaliningrad GTRK. 25 February.
• Kravets O., Gromak V., Anisimov S. Let's break it all down brick by brick: the Moscow Patriarchate today is ready to fight even with its yesterday's allies // New news. 2004. March 25.