All About Azerbaijan

Last night Azerbaijan surprisingly won the Eurovision song contest, easily beating the critics’ (and bookies’) favorites France, Sweden and Ireland – and they rarely get it wrong on big events like Eurovision. When watching Eurovision, other than noticing that about 90% songs were English – quite surprising considering that the UK – the people who would be expected to sing best in English – don’t normally do that well -, I also noticed that I didn’t actually have a clue about Azerbaijan, where it is, what language it speaks, what the culture is like and all the other interesting things that might be expected from me. Here is my fact file:

• The capital city is Baku
• Just over 9,000,000 people are thought to live there
• It is on the edge of the Caspian Sea
• It is bordered by Russia, Armenia, Turkey, Georgia and Iran
• The official language is Azerbaijani and to say hello you would say ‘Salam’, so look out for lots of this next year
• The current political system is a Presidential Republic (with a President and Prime Minister), however it has been a Democratic Republic (1918) – the first Islamic state of its kind – before being taken over by the Soviet Union in 1920, finally gaining independence in 1991 with the disillusion of Communism
• Azerbaijan is technically considered by the United Nations (which it is a member of) to be in Asia, however it is in the Eurasian area, which why it (and the other former Eastern Bloc countries) is allowed to perform in Eurovision
• During World War Two, Azerbaijan fought with the Soviet Union, supplying men and oil
• 90% of the people are considered to be Azerbaijani, and much of the remaining ten percent is made up from peoples from former Eastern Bloc countries
• 99% of the people are Muslim
• The three most popular sports are Freestyle Wrestling, Football and Chess
• The Azerbaijan National Aerospace Agency plans to launch its first satellite in summer 2012
• Azerbaijan is very mountainous, however 9 of the 11 climate zones exist within Azerbaijan, with temperatures ranging from -33 degress Celsius to +44 degrees Celsius

And because I quite enjoyed that, I might do something like this for more countries in the future. Please put ideas in the comments!