Mother Teresa
Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu commonly called Mother Teresa, and known in the Roman Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta (born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, ; 26 August 1910 – 5 September 1997), was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary. She was born in Skopje (now the capital of Macedonia), then part of the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. After living in Macedonia for eighteen years she moved to Ireland and then to India, where she lived for most of her life.
Mother Teresa
Teresa has been commemorated by museums and named the patroness of a number of churches. She has had buildings, roads and complexes named after her, including Albania's international airport. Mother Teresa Day "(Dita e Nënë Terezës)", 19 October, is a public holiday in Albania. In 2009 the Memorial House of Mother Teresa was opened in her hometown of Skopje, Macedonia. The Roman Catholic cathedral in Pristina, Kosovo, is named in her honour. Its construction, begun in 2011, sparked controversy in Muslim circles who saw it as oversized relative to the number of Catholics in the area. An initiative to erect a monument to Teresa in the town of Peć (according to activists, 98 percent Muslim) was opposed by Kosovo Muslims.
Mother Teresa Women's University, in Kodaikanal, was established in 1984 as a public university by the government of Tamil Nadu. The Mother Theresa Postgraduate and Research Institute of Health Sciences, in Pondicherry, was established in 1999 by the government of Puducherry. The charitable organisation Sevalaya runs the Mother Teresa Girls Home, providing poor and orphaned girls near the underserved village of Kasuva in Tamil Nadu with free food, clothing, shelter and education. A number of tributes by Teresa's biographer, Navin Chawla, have appeared in Indian newspapers and magazines. Indian Railways introduced the "Mother Express", a new train named after Mother Teresa, on 26 August 2010 to commemorate the centenary of her birth. The Tamil Nadu government organised centenary celebrations honouring Teresa on 4 December 2010 in Chennai, headed by chief minister M Karunanidhi. Beginning on 5 September 2013, the anniversary of her death has been designated the International Day of Charity by the United Nations General Assembly.