It's about approximately ten hectares of land on the eastern outskirts of the city, where the Bektashi Order has had its headquarters for over 100 years.
The site is to be transformed, with the help of the Albanian government, into "a sovereign state, a new center for moderation, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence," said Albania's Prime Minister Edi Rama when he appeared at the UN in New York on Sunday.
The Bektashi Order is a Shia Muslim and Sufi community often regarded as a particularly open branch of the world religion. It originated in the early Ottoman Empire but was expelled from there by Turkey's founding father Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s.
It is the fourth largest religious group in Albania and accounts for approximately ten percent of the country's total Muslim population. A larger proportion of followers live in Turkey.
Bektashi Sufists make free interpretations of the Koran, incorporating folk beliefs and supernatural elements, and have historically been persecuted as heretics even by other Muslim denominations.
God does not forbid anything. That is why he gave us the ability to think, says the movement's highest leader Edmond Brahimaj, referred to as Baba Mondi by his followers, to The New York Times.
Prime Minister Rama has created international headlines with this initiative, but he is being criticized at home by opponents who dismiss it as political grandstanding.
