Ashot Nadanian - Early Years

Early Years

Nadanian was born on 19 September 1972 in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, which then was part of the Soviet Union, to Sergei and Irina, both hairdressers. He was taught to play chess by his father when he was seven. His early coach was Rafael Sarkisov, who took him on as a pupil at Spartak in Baku. In his article The Voiceless Old Man Nadanian recollects, that when he was nine or ten there were almost no chess tournaments in which young players could play with seniors and therefore he often went to the park near his house to play chess with older chess lovers. He remembers that in one of these park-battles he played against a mysterious, silent stranger who turned out to be the highly-respected chess champion Vladimir Makogonov. In 1986 and 1987 Nadanian won the under-sixteen Azerbaijani championship. With the beginning of the Nagorno-Karabakh War in 1988, his family was forced to leave Baku and flee to Armenia.