Once the church was built, its tower that rose above many of the town's mosques became a sore point with local conservative Muslims who wanted traditional limitations on non-Muslim architecture to be imposed.

The new church dedication ceremony was scheduled for May 1871; however, a group of forty lower-class Muslims, led by a Sarajevo imam Salih Vilajetović (better known as Hadži Lojo), sought to block it.

[1] When notified of the intended obstruction, the Bosnian Vilayet's Ottoman governor ordered the police to arrest Hadži Lojo and his followers.

The next year, in the summer of 1872, the Ottoman officials dispatched a new military commander with more than thousand men in order to provide security for the church dedication.

Concerned about local Muslim vandal attacks, as a show of force the Ottoman governor ordered the positioning of a cannon above the city and the deployment of troops to guard the ceremony.

The festive dedication on 20 July 1872, attended by high Ottoman officials and by the young Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Serbia, Béni Kállay (who would later play an important role in Bosnia), proceeded without incident.