Armenia’s national soccer team will play an international friendly on Turkish soil against Belarus on March 3, reported national soccer’s governing body on Tuesday.

A spokesman for the Football Federation of Armenia told ArmeniaNow that the choice of the venue for the game, the city of Antalya (match venue: Ataturk Stadium), is conditioned by the fact that the Belarus team will be spending their training assemblies there at that time.

Earlier, the Federation had hoped to set up a friendly game against an international competitor in Cyprus.

The Federation’s spokesman found it difficult to say how many Armenian fans, if at all, could be attending the game in the Mediterranean city.

The last time Armenia played on Turkish soil was on October 14, 2009 when the national team lost to hosts in the northwestern city of Bursa 0-2 in a FIFA World Cup 2010 qualifier. Part of the so-called ‘soccer diplomacy’, that game was staged only four days after the signing of the Armenian-Turkish protocols on establishing diplomatic ties and developing bilateral relations between the two estranged neighbors.