Capital to welcome Second International Tea Festival

By Azernews

By Narmina Mammadova

The Second International Tea Festival, organized by the Azerbaijani Association of National Cookery and the Center for National Cookery, will be held on International Chefs Day in Baku, event organizers told Trend Life.

The event will be held at Sheraton Baku Airport Hotel on October 20 at 11 a.m.

The tea traditions of Azerbaijan, Japan, Turkey, China, India, Russia, Uzbekistan and other countries will be presented at the festival.

Annually, cooks from all over the world celebrate International Chefs Day on October 20. The date was established in 2004 at the initiative of the World Association of Culinary Communities. This organization has 8 million members - representatives of the chef profession from different countries.

The event has been celebrated for 14 years in the world and 12 in Azerbaijan.

The celebration of International Chefs Day has become widespread in more than 70 countries. In addition to directly culinary specialists, employees of travel companies, owners of catering enterprises take part in organizing festive events. Various culinary competitions are held, festivals, tastings with cooking culinary delights and other events are organized on this day.

The first International Tea Festival was held in Baku on October 20, 2015. Representatives of Azerbaijan, Turkey, Indonesia, Japan, Iran, Uzbekistan, India, China, Tajikistan took part in it. The guests of the festival had the opportunity to take part in a tea ceremony, enjoy various sorts of tea, as well as try national dishes and sweets of participating countries.

Azerbaijani tea culture has a time-honored history, since this beverage is an integral part of people’s daily life in the country. Azerbaijan is among the leading countries in terms of tea consumption per capita.

Azerbaijan is also the largest tea producer among the CIS countries. This applies not only to black tea varieties, but also to green ones. For the first time, small tea plantations yielded crops at the end of the 19th century in the South Caucasus region of Azerbaijan, but the development of local tea growing started only in 1932.

In the country, tea is mainly grown in the Lankaran-Astara region. This is an area of some 5,330 sq. km. and includes Astara, Lankaran, Masalli, Lerik, Yardimli and Jalilabad regions. Tea is grown in the first four of these regions. About 91 percent of tea production in Azerbaijan falls to the share of Lankaran.