Christian converts in Kosovo, where the vast majority of people are Muslim, hope to revive a pre-Islamic past they see as a key to their European identity.
The Catholic priest stood at the altar in the hilltop church for the mass baptism, dunking dozens of heads in water and tracing a cross with his finger on each forehead. Then he rejoiced at Christianity’s recovery of souls in a land where the vast majority of people are Muslim — as the men, women and children standing before him had been. The ceremony was one of many in recent months in Kosovo, a formerly Serbian territory inhabited largely by ethnic Albanians that declared itself an independent state in 2008. In a census last spring, 93 percent of the population professed itself Muslim and only 1.75 percent Roman Catholic.