The Orthodox Church has complained that it has had difficulty in recovering some religious icons for restoration and safekeeping. There was no change in the status of respect for religious freedom during the period covered by this report. There were no reports of religious detainees or prisoners. There were no reports of the forced religious conversion of minor U.S. citizens who had been abducted or illegally removed from the United States, or of the Government's refusal to allow such citizens to be returned to the United States. Societal Attitudes Relations among the various religious groups generally are amicable, and tolerance is widespread.
Society is largely secular.
Intermarriage among religious groups is extremely common. The Archbishop of the country's Orthodox Church has noted incidents in which the Orthodox and their churches or other buildings have been the targets of vandalism. However, the Archbishop also noted that there was little if any evidence of active persecution against the ethnic Greek minority and concluded that the problem was the country's general climate of insecurity, rather than religious repression. Members of the ethnic Greek minority as well as of the Orthodox Church have been leaving the country for the last year and one-half because of the lack of security and the lack of economic prospects. There are long standing concerns among Christians about the growing support for Islamic fundamentalism as a result of the influx of Kosovar refugees entering the country.