Religion in Albania, Explained

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Albania has Muslims, Bektashis, Orthodox Christians and Catholics. They have lived alongside each other for a very long time. From 1967 to 1990 the government banned all religion — the only country ever to do that.

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The four communities

Sunni Islam — the largest community, established over centuries of Ottoman rule.
The Bektashi Order — a Sufi order with its world headquarters in Tirana since 1925, historically strong in the south.
Albanian Orthodoxy — autocephalous since 1937, concentrated in the south and south-east.
Roman Catholicism — concentrated in the north, around Shkodër and the highlands.

How the four communities came to be

Christianity reached the Albanian coast in Roman times; the church of Durrës traces itself to the apostles by tradition, and its bishops sat at the early church councils. Because the region sat on the line between Rome and Constantinople, the split of 1054 left it divided: the north looked to the Pope, the south to the Orthodox patriarch, a pattern that still holds.

Islam arrived with the Ottomans in the 15th century and spread gradually rather than all at once, through the 16th to 18th centuries, helped by the tax advantages and careers open to Muslims. The Bektashi order, a Sufi brotherhood tied to the Janissaries, put down deep roots in the south; many leaders of the 19th-century national movement, such as the poet Naim Frashëri, were Bektashi, and the order moved its world headquarters to Tirana in 1925 after Atatürk banned the Sufi orders in Turkey.

Independent Albania built national churches of its own: an Albanian Orthodox church was proclaimed at the Congress of Berat in 1922 and recognised as autocephalous by Constantinople in 1937. After the 1967 ban, the first public Mass was said in Shkodër in November 1990, worship was permitted again by the end of that year, and the communities have been rebuilding their clergy, buildings and schools ever since — the Orthodox church largely under Archbishop Anastasios, who led it from 1992 until 2025.

Coexistence

Albania's religious tolerance is frequently remarked on and is genuinely unusual, though it is sometimes overstated into a myth. What is well documented is a long history of mixed communities, intermarriage, and shared local shrines — and the wartime sheltering of Jewish refugees across all four communities.

The atheist state

In 1967 the communist government declared Albania the world's first atheist state. Mosques and churches were closed, destroyed or converted; clergy were imprisoned or killed; religious names were discouraged and in some cases prohibited. The ban lasted until 1990.

The effect was durable. When religion became legal again, institutions had to be rebuilt from almost nothing, and levels of active practice remain lower than nominal affiliation would suggest.

Why the numbers are disputed

Census figures on religion in Albania are contested by several of the communities themselves, on grounds ranging from methodology to non-response. Any single percentage should be treated as one estimate from one instrument, not as a settled fact. This Atlas states the source and the year whenever it gives one.