Sean Williams
In 1988, war broke out between Armenia and its Soviet Republic neighbor
of Azerbaijan, over the long-disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. It was
another tragedy in a century of tragedies for Armenia, going back to the
genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenian people,
beginning in 1915. When the 1988 war began (*), thousands of ethnic
Armenians who lived in Azerbaijan fled their homes. One of them was
Melikset Khachiyan, a chess player who studied the game, as a teen-ager,
under Tigran Petrosian, Armenia’s greatest-ever player. Khachiyan had
shown early promise, but a shot at the game’s highest level, in an era
of legends like Kasparov, Karpov, and Tal, eluded him. Now he needed a
place to stay. He headed to Yerevan, Armenia’s pretty, pink-stoned
capital; there, Grigory and Seda Aronian offered him a room in their
modest home on the edge of town. Rather than pay rent, they suggested,
he could teach their six-year-old son, Levon, chess.
