(Reuters) – Pakistani taxi driver Muhammad Zafeer says he has to look over his shoulder when he goes to pray in Athens, where racist attackers have targeted several of the many makeshift mosques set up in cramped garages or dingy warehouses.

So Greece’s plan to build a state-funded mosque in the capital, more than a century in the making, comes as a relief, even if it will be housed in a disused naval base littered with weeds and rubble in a rundown neighborhood.

“This place used to be packed but these days people are scared to even go out to pray,” said Zafeer, as Muslim men in long traditional robes and colorful caps prepared for Friday prayers behind the steel-grilled windows of a former factory.

“Greece has to decide if it will be democratic or if it will go back to the Middle Ages,” he said with a shrug.

Reviving the long-stalled project during Greece’s worst peacetime economic crisis has divided a country that spent four centuries under Turkish Ottoman rule, where the Orthodox Church is powerful and hostility towards immigrants is rising.