The ninth largest country in the world, Kazakhstan is so central to Central Asia – which in the past was synonymous with remote – that even the Portuguese who arrived by sea in China and Japan and whose Jesuits traveled through Tibet or Bhutan are not known to have arrived there. This does not prevent the fact that when we tell a Kazakh today that we come from Portugal, we are not greeted with a classic “Ah, Ronaldo!” or the less obvious “Lara Aleixo”.
Here, knowledge about Kazakhstan may not be proportional to the size of that giant, sandwiched between China and Russia (but also close to the USA and the European Union), but football lovers may recognize Kairat Almaty as one of Sporting’s opponents in the Champions League.
Music and football, two good reasons to learn more about each other, despite the more than six thousand kilometers that separate Lisbon from Astana.
Executive editor of Diário de Notícias
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