Republic of Macedonia is a country at the crossroads of eastern and western civilizations. Orthodox, Muslims and in smaller numbers Catholics, Protestant and Jews live here together.
In this country it is very common to find a town with both a church and a mosque. However there are some town without mosques as well. This illustrates that Republic of Macedonia is indeed at the crossroad of eastern and western civilizations.
The majority, 64,7% of the population belongs to the Macedonian Orthodox Church.
Muslims comprise 33,3% of the population and other Christian denominations comprise 0,37%.
The remainder 1,63% is recorded as "unspecified" in the 2002 national census. Most of the native Albanians, Turks and Bosniaks are Muslims, as are a minority of the country's ethnic Macedonian population, known as Macedonian Muslims (local terms are: Goranci, Torbeshi).
Altogether, there are more than 1,200 churches and 400 mosques in the country. The Orthodox and Islamic religious communities have secondary religion schools in Skopje. There is an Orthodox theological college in the capital. Macedonia has the largest proportion of Muslims of any country in Europe after Turkey, Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
