Skopje, Oct 15: As the world prepares to celebrate the beatification of Mother Teresa, a bitter row over her ethnic origin is straining fraught relations between Macedonians and Albanians in her home town. Mother Teresa was born Agnesa Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910 in Skopje to an ethnic Albanian mother and a father of unknown background, giving rise to a debate which the future saint never bothered to resolve in her lifetime.
"Both her parents were born in Skopje," was all that Pina Markovska, 89, a relative of Mother Teresa, would say about the ongoing dispute over whether she was Macedonian or Albanian.
Skopje has always been a cosmopolitan town at the crossroads of Asia and Europe, and as such it forms an apt departure point for Teresa's religious quest to help the poorest of the poor regardless of cast or creed.
Macedonia and neighbouring Albania did not even exist when Teresa was born toward the end of Ottoman rule, and she most probably identified herself as a Catholic ahead of other, more recent notions of nationhood.
The territory of Macedonia itself changed a lot in Teresa's lifetime, with the collapse of the Ottoman empire, two world wars, the rise and fall of communist Yugoslavia and the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Throughout the communist years the six Republics of the Yugoslav Federation were encouraged to play down their ethnic differences for the sake of the party and the common good. Bureau Report