Secretary General of the Serbian Chess Federation Andrija Jorgic, who is in Armenia these days, already had several meetings and reached agreements on introducing the Armenian experience of chess in Serbia.
Andrija Jorgic gave an interview to ARMENPRESS, presenting details from the agreements reached during the visit in Armenia.
- Mr. Jorgic, during your visit in Armenia you met with Deputy Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sport Karen Giloyan. What issues were discussed?
- Agreements were reached to cooperate in sports field, and chess will be as the first direction. We are very interested in Armenia’s achievements in that area, particularly, the practice of making chess a mandatory subject in schools. We want to launch this model of Armenia in Serbia so that our school-children learn chess at an early age. There is a chess subject in our schools, but it is not mandatory. We want to make it compulsory, and for that purpose we came to Armenia to specify how Armenia could help us. Chess is very important, it is not only a sport, but also a culture, a tradition and positively affects children’s development.
We visited the Chess Academy, met also with Smbat Lputyan [Founder-President of the Chess Academy, four-time champion, grandmaster] who presented us what a positive result the teaching of chess in schools has. We seek to make chess a very widespread in our country. We want people to be interested in chess, watch the games, as it was in 1963 when Petrosyan and Botvinnik were playing, when everyone was watching the game.
I am very impressed by your Chess Academy. If we succeed in doing half of this work in Serbia, I think, in the near future Serbia would have had chess champions, like Levon Aronian. We reached an agreement with the Armenian partners over starting working in different directions, creating preconditions so that Armenian chess-player children, coaches come to Serbia, and vice versa, to get acquainted with your experience.
- So there are agreements over mutual visits, exchange of experience. When you go back to Serbia, from where would you start? What will be your first steps for implementing the agreements reached?
- The first steps are already done, we are here. We will have a tournament in Serbia in one and a half month, and we have agreed to do everything so that chess-players from Armenia come and participate in it. I want to note that our partners of Armenia have already provided us with respective literature that we should take with us. We plan to do so that specialists from Armenia visit Serbia, get acquainted with our conditions and discuss together how to develop this direction, what actions to take to make chess a mandatory subject in schools.
- As you said, chess is not a mandatory subject in your schools. But what is the dynamics? Is the number of sc...
Read full story