Baku, August 23 — Weddings in Azerbaijan are supposed to be a celebration of love, family, and new beginnings. Instead, they are increasingly turning into a financial cage — a ritual where happiness is measured not by the couple’s future, but by the size of the banquet bill.
Banquet halls across the country are fully booked through the end of the year. Menus have grown more expensive — 2–5 manats extra per guest — as meat prices climb. For a 100-person wedding, a family can expect to spend 12–15,000 manats just for the restaurant. Add in dowries, gifts, bands, decorations, and a dozen other “musts,” and the total can cripple a household for years.
Let’s be honest: this is no longer about celebration. It’s about showing off. Families feel forced to compete with one another in a grotesque game of one-upmanship. Who had the bigger hall? The fancier tablecloths? The longer guest list? Love gets buried under a mountain of pilaf and debt.
The waste is staggering. Plates of untouched food head straight to the trash, even as families take out loans to pay for them. Couples start their life together not with a foundation of stability, but with a balance sheet dripping in red. What should mark the beginning of a shared journey becomes a lesson in financial survival.
Lawmakers, like MP Jeyhun Mammadov, urge society to look at Europe, where weddings are increasingly small, simple, and intimate — about people, not performances. But here, tradition has morphed into tyranny. The fear of judgment — “What will the neighbors say?” — shackles young couples to outdated social expectations.
It’s time to break the cycle. A wedding should not be a debt trap. It should not be a status competition that empties savings, delays home ownership, or forces families into years of repayment. It should be what it was meant to be: the joyful start of a life together.
Until society admits that extravagance is not tradition but vanity, weddings in Azerbaijan will remain less about love — and more about loans.
