Проституция в Сортавале.

Приводил тут в порядок архив своего сортавальского журнала и наткнулся на статью о проституции в городе, датированной 2001 годом. Она была опубликована в англоязычной версии Хелсингин Саномат.

Sex from Sortavala - Finland and the Karelian Pattaya

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By Mika Parkkonen in Sortavala
Photos: Liisa Takala / HS and Timo Villanen / HS

A greying Finnish man, probably in his mid-sixties, kisses a young and very attractive Russian girl in the middle of a cafe & bar car park at the crossroads leading to the village of Värtsilä, just over the border in Russian Karelia. The tongue-kiss goes on and on. The cafeteria customers grin through the windows and laugh at the couple: frontier erotica.

It turns out that it is a farewell kiss. The grey-haired Finnish man jumps into his car. As he does so, another equally young girl opens the rear door and gets out of the car. She has been saying her goodbyes to another elderly Finnish man. The car drives off towards Finland. I write down the registration plate, but we'll come back to that later.

The girls, meanwhile, walk over to the road leading south to Sortavala and start hitching. They get a ride immediately from another car arriving from the Finnish side of the border.

Even weekday nights there is action in Sortavala.

Over the last six years I have made 28 trips to Karelia in the course of my work. Each summer the road from the border has been lined by an increasing number of prostitutes, and they have become progressively younger. In this time, Sortavala has developed into a sex-tourism centre to which the Finns flock in search of skirt and strong liquor. It is impossible not to notice the prostitution in Sortavala, unless one keeps one's eyes tightly closed.

 New girls appear all the time. The Sortavala authorities are unwilling to disclose the precise number, although each and every one is registered. I try to do the numbers myself. My rough estimate is around 200. The great majority of them are seasonal: many students turn tricks during the summer months, when there are plenty of tourists around and no other work is available.

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