World Water Day
Description:
Like many peoples of the world, and Azerbaijanis after a person going on a long journey, always poured water. People’s faith in the cleansing power of water gave them hope. Thus, according to one of the beliefs among Azerbaijanis, forty vessels of water should be poured on the head of the guilty person. Or, for example, the custom of telling the water bad dreams still exists.
Purification by water is also expressed in the custom of jumping seven times through the flowing water on the last Wednesday before the festival of Nowruz. This was done to cleanse the sins and sorrows of the outgoing year. And in the morning after the New Year there was a custom to bring water from the spring.
Our ancestors also believed that the spirit of water could harm a person who drinks water. To avoid this, they advised covering the head with a hat before drinking water. It was considered a bad omen to bring water from the spring in the evenings, said Aisel Umid, researcher at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of Azerbaijan.
Today, in Azerbaijan, as in many countries of the world, the problem of safe drinking water is very acute. Of great concern are the pollution of drinking sources of our country as a result of dumping into them untreated or insufficiently cleaned contaminated sources that get there from settlements, enterprises, agriculture, etc.
We will not go into the details of the disclosure of this problem, since this is a topic for a separate discussion. In 2003, President Ilham Aliyev approved the national program on ecologically sustainable socio-economic development, according to which every citizen of Azerbaijan should have access to clean and high-quality water until 2010.