By Daniel Howden Muslim News 30 July, 2004

Athens' first new mosque in more than 175 years will not be ready in time for next month's Athens Olympics, says the government.

Greek authorities had linked the planned mosque to efforts to bolster the country's image among Muslim nations competing in August's Olympiad.

Athens is home to an estimated 100,000 Muslim Albanians, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Moroccans, Syrians and Nigerians, but it is the only European Union capital with no officially recognised mosque.

Bureaucratic hurdles have prevented its construction in Peania 35 km (20 miles) from the capital, the foreign ministry said.

"The project is in a final stage now and only bureaucratic procedures are outstanding," ministry spokesman George Koumoutsakos told reporters on Wednesday.

He said work on the mosque, the first since the end of the Ottoman rule in the late 1820s, would start in the months after the August 13-29 Olympics.

The Athens mosque has been on the drawing board for 20 years but faced strong opposition from the powerful Orthodox Church of Greece that claims the allegiance of over 90 percent of Greece's 11 million population.

Initially the church opposed a city centre location saying Greeks, who were ruled for about 400 years by the Muslim Ottoman Empire, were not ready to see a minaret in downtown Athens.

But a network of underground mosques has mushroomed in basement flats in immigrant neighbourhoods.

The project which will include an Islamic cultural centre, is funded by the Saudi Arabian government, Koumoutsakos said.

Games organisers have set up a temporary multi-faith place of worship inside the Olympic village in northern Athens that will cater for all religious needs of athletes from a record 202 countries.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan last year asked Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, based in Istanbul, to help re-open an Ottoman-era mosque in central Athens that is currently a disused museum. But there has been no official response from Athens to Erdogan's request.