Eniz Fazliov
May 01, 2007 @ 10:55 AM
About four years ago there was an article in the Finnish skate mag Numero on three up and coming young rippers. Their names were Tuukka Korhonen, Miikka Virtanen and Eniz Fazliov, although Eniz’s name was spelled wrong and has been ever since in most instances. In the intro to the thing it said something about how good they were with a bizarre side note predicting that three years on, only one of them would still be skating.
Text and Photos by Deeli
Since then Tuukka’s got on three international teams, dropped out of high school to skate full time and become something of a household name in the European scheme of things. Miikka’s backed up by a big clothing company and recently took home the best trick in a major Finnish comp right under the noses of a host of international superstars. And Eniz? Well, Eniz just won the Finnish champs and has his foot stuck firmly in the doors of Emerica and Volcom. And when his local board sponsor Happy Hour decides to go continental, Eniz will be their hard currency. Couple of years back, on a usual weekday in Torremolinos, Foppa made a comment about the number of immigrants Finland takes in annually. According to Foppa, the year before, Sweden took in 30 000 people. Finland took 3. Eniz wasn’t one of those three that year – he arrived from Albania 15 years ago when he was only four – but back when he came, his family must have made up the whole annual quota. Once in the country, it took him 13 odd years to get his citizenship. Meanwhile, when his friends would take off for Barcelona for the winter, Eniz would stay in Helsinki filling out forms for his passport, no doubt.
When his sponsors would ask him to take a little trip to the US, he would politely decline the offer and instead run from one office to another literally pushing his applications forward through the cogs of post- Soviet Finnish bureaucracy. An Albanian passport isn’t the easiest one to travel with, so rather than risking refused entry at the end of a trans-Atlantic flight, Eniz stayed home, buried in the underground skatepark in a nuclear bomb shelter in the suburbs of Helsinki. Perhaps not such a bad choice in hindsight. The months he’s put in in that park have made him good friends with obstacles of all shapes and sizes. But rather than becoming a park rat, Eniz will be the first to stick his head above ground when there’s a patch of dry pavement in between the heaps of snow come spring time. And it doesn’t take him long to make the winter months’ sessions work for him on true street. When his citizenship finally came through, it didn’t come free. The state of Finland expects its male citizens to give up six months to a year of their lives running around in the forests with machine guns and land mines banned by international law pretending it’s a good old-fashioned war. Something I suspect Eniz’s family wanted to get away from in the first place, when they left the Balkans in the early 90’s. At the moment, Eniz is safe and sound finishing up his education to become a painter (not the art fag kind that everyone wants to be now, but the real thing, the one that paints furniture and houses), which means that the Government can’t touch him. He’ll be done by the summer though, and then it’ll be the usual struggle against the generals and colonels and what have you to get the chance to finally enjoy the freedom to travel he waited for such a long time. For now Eniz is saying he won’t put up a fight against the military and will be joining the war game January 2008. Armed forces aside, the only obstacle left on his way to an endless summer is the language barrier.
The few people outside of Finland, who have so far come in contact with Eniz know that his English isn’t exactly the smoothest thing about him. When he answers a polite question with an empty stare and turns away with a stupid grin on his face, he’s not being intentionally rude, really. It’s just that he doesn’t have a clue what you’re saying, much less knows how to answer. The years he’s spent up north have done a good job turning him into a clumsy and quiet Finn instead of the intensely warm and open Balkanite he might have grown up to be, had he stayed where he was born. Take my word for it, though: he really is quite a happy camper and a genuinely nice guy. And at the age of 19, he’s already got the laziest 360 flips in the business.
