Five women in a Turkish sauna

Earlier this month, I went to soccer game in Lenkeran; Azerbaijan was playing Finland for the world cup qualifiers. We had about 8 PCVs come down south for the game. A few of us were hanging out at the beach that day and met this Finnish reporter. He was a really sweet guy, so we invited him to have dinner with us. He writes for the "Helsingin Sanomat", which is one of the biggest papers in the Nordic region. He told us he was going to send us a copy of the article, and he did! Of course, the article was in Finnish, but Tommi was sweet enough to translate it for us.

Note the impeccable usage of English, and that is his 2nd or 3rd language!



Five women in a Turkish sauna

Luckily the sun went down. Before the start of the match it was scorching so bad the feeling in Khazar-Lankaran stadium was like in a Turkish sauna.

It did fit the picture, since the Azeri think of themselves as a Turkish people. The loud bass of Turkish pop vibrating from the passing cars took thoughts to the beach vacations spent in Turkey, surely even for the national team players of Finland.

As a relief for the players, the temperature dropped several degrees in one whoosh by the time of the starting whistle. But the humidity of a Turkish sauna disappeared nowhere.

The players working on the pitch didn’t get to enjoy the same treatment as the spectators. With its red, the setting sun drew the figure of the Caucasus Mountains just before the last traces of the range dip into the Caspian Sea.

The first international match of the town was a big thing for Lankaran. In the centre the arrival of Finland was still marketed with large Sami Hyypiä-posters, although the match was sold out weeks ago. The stadium filled up almost an hour before the match, but the never-ending storm of clapping and shouting started even earlier.

A banderol behind one of the goals welcomed Finland in a threatening way while reminding of the true character of the “sea”: “You are in the deepest place of the biggest lake on Earth!”

Watching football in Azerbaidzhan drops to the same category as visiting the beach or buying alcohol: not for women. The laws of this secular but Muslim country don’t forbid any of these vices from women, but the breakers of etiquette are given a bad eye and made sure the whole neighbourhood knows about their actions.

Besides the Finnish fans there were so few women in the stadium of Lankaran that it’s possible to list the names of each one: Jaclyn Gilstrap, Hiba Hakam, Emma Jackson, Julia Richards and Rachel Wurdeman. Even these American voluntary workers wouldn’t have dared to enter the match as a group of girls and instead arrived with their male colleagues.

For the Azeri women the gates of the stadium don’t open even in the company of their own husbands.