A long-awaited homecoming

Qarabag are on course to win the ninth Azerbaijani Premier League title of their history. And maybe, for the first time, they’ll be able to celebrate this achievement in their hometown, Agdam.

The club belongs to a disputed region that, sadly, has become famous for a long war between the Azerbaijani army and the self-proclaimed independent republic of Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. The conflict is one of the many legacies of the Soviet Union.

The name Nagorno-Karabakh embodies all the complexity, cultural richness and contradictions of a region in which the word “peace” disappeared from the vocabulary 30 years ago. While Nagorno is a Russian adjective that translates as “mountainous”, Karabakh – the traditional pre-Soviet name for the region – is made up of two words of different origin: , meaning “black”, and, meaning “garden”, a term from the Farsi language. To make the mixture even richer and the tangle more inextricable, the local Armenian population uses the term Artsakh to describe this rocky and harsh patch of land, wedged between Armenia and Azerbaijan and disputed by the two countries for decades.