Poles Protest Illegal Mosque Disguised as Community Center in Kraków

On Monday evening, hundreds of people gathered to protest in front of a residential building in Kraków, Poland’s second-largest city, after it had been revealed that a “community center” in one of the rental apartments had actually been operating as an illegal mosque for some time, without the knowledge of other residents.

The main organizer of the demonstration was right-wing activist Michał Kostrzyński, who led a months-long investigation into the alleged community center and documented his findings online. Kostrzyński learned that the space was actually a house of Muslim worship, run without proper authorization by the Al-Fajr Foundation, a self-described “Islamic and cultural foundation based in Kraków, established to serve, support, and empower the Muslim community in Kraków and across Poland.”

While the staff insisted that it was only a “community center” for cultural education and nothing more—the same thing they told residents—Kostrzyński found their fundraiser requests from last year, in which they were openly asking for donations for a third “house of prayer,” because the other two in the city were already at full capacity. 

The protest, attended by some 200 locals, showed that residents want to have a say in what happens in their neighborhood and that they “do not agree to the quiet Islamization of Krakow,” Kostrzyński said.

The National Movement party (RN)—part of Konfederacja in the Polish Parliament—also joined the protest as co-organizer, and so did several members of the Border Defense Movement (ROG), a growing citizens’ initiative against illegal migration. 

“We do not consent to changing the spatial and cultural order of our city. Kraków is not Paris, Berlin, or Brussels,” RN’s local leader, Piotr Bartosz, said in his address at the protest. “Kraków is the city of Polish kings, and Poland is a nation-state with a thousand-year Christian tradition that we will defend.”

Bartosz added that Germany and France already have between 2,500 and 3,000 mosques each, a symptom of an irreversible demographic shift that is eroding native cultural identities and helping “Islamo-leftist” parties gain political power in Western Europe.

In response to the protest, Krakow’s municipal official for equality, Ewelina Pytel, lashed out against the organizers for “attempting to artificially fuel fear and instigate conflicts” by spreading false information about the Islamic center and reminded them that the freedom of religion also includes freely operating places of worship for any religion. 

What she forgot is that the main problem of the residents was that none of them were told there would be such a house of prayer in their building. Listening to the complaints, at least, the owner of the flat reportedly decided not to renew the lease of the tenants.