Writer and ambassador’s wife NOUNEH SARKISSIAN’s life in privileged Chelsea is a far cry from her upbringing in Soviet Armenia. She tells Charlotte Pearson Methven about the unexpected benefit of communism: creativity
Let us remind you, that husband of Nouneh Sarkissian, Armen Sargsyan, is the candidate of Armenia’s ruling Republican party for the president. Daily Mail interviewed her in 2016.
I am sitting in a sumptuous drawing room overlooking the Thames, enjoying watermelon slices and cherries from a silver salver. My hostess, Nouneh Sarkissian, 62, is the wife of Armenia’s ambassador to Britain.
She also has one of the world’s largest collections of David Linley furniture and numbers the designer himself – the Queen’s nephew – among her closest friends. A journalist by background, she is now a successful children’s author (Linley hosted the launch party for her latest book, The Magic Buttons, at his flagship store last December). But there is nothing showy about Nouneh.
Her exquisite furniture collection – bespoke Linley tables, chairs and bookshelves, alongside art deco treasures, antiques, rare pieces of Japanese art and old masters – is referred to with quiet appreciation.
Nouneh can’t tell me exactly how many Linley pieces there are, but they seem to be everywhere, blending in seamlessly in this immaculate Chelsea town house. ‘We met David at the wedding of Armenian friends in Beirut in 1995 and have been close to him and [his wife] Serena ever since. We like his style. If I buy a set of Russian Imperial chairs, he will build a table to match. We don’t consider our Linley collection to be furniture. We see each item as a work of art that will be passed down to future generations,’ she says.
Nouneh’s husband Armen – an astrophysicist and former prime minister of Armenia – is now serving his third stint as Armenian ambassador in the UK. As well as being a prominent diplomat and politician, he is one of Armenia’s most esteemed scientists and professors, and was, therefore, in a perfect position to broker oil and energy deals with the West when his country gained economic freedom from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Hence his wealth, and the seven-storey house at one of London’s best addresses (he’s also one of the creators of the cultishly popular tile-matching video game Tetris, which may have helped, too).
But Nouneh is too erudite and polite to talk about money. She and Armen met at school in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia (then communist, and a part of the Soviet Union since 1922), when she was 14 and he was 15.
In contrast to their current gilded existence, they grew up in the austerity of the Soviet regime – a life Nouneh remembers as repressive, but also secure and nurturing of creative talent.
‘I don’t regret sacrificing my own ambitions for the wellbeing of my family,’ says Nouneh
‘My father was a journalist and my mother a teacher, so we were part of the intelligentsia. There were no classes in our society back then, just layers, and we were the second layer, after the nomenklatura – politicians and dignitaries who were allowed to travel and had access to foreign goods.
‘We weren’t rich but we were educated, with enough money to feed and clothe ourselves. I never felt deprived. It wasn’t a bad childhood and I knew no different.’
Nouneh does, however, recall some sinister moments. ‘There was always a sense that we were being watched,’ she recalls. ‘My mother would say to us, “Be careful. Don’t tell jokes. The walls have ears.”
‘And you felt it from a young age. It is something I will never forget. The fear was everywhere – that’s how the regime lasted so long.
‘My father, as a journalist, had to be very careful to use the right words and phrases. When he became the editor-in-chief of the monthly newspaper World of Books, he had to make sure not to allow the “wrong” titles to be reviewed.
‘You could lose your life for using the wrong word or picture. I remember a story of someone spilling tea on Stalin’s photo in a newspaper and having to go for an interrogation.
‘The fear was even worse during his regime; I was born a year after his death – nine years after the Second World War ended – and can still remember seeing people who had lost limbs fighting in the war. It was very gruesome.’
But there was an upside to growing up in a communist regime: the huge emphasis that was placed on culture. ‘Our schools were amazing,’ says Nouneh, ‘and we were given tickets to theatre, opera, classical music and the best ballet in the world – all for free!’
Nouneh was a bright talent in her own right; her early promise evident when she got herself a job at a local radio station aged ten, which meant travelling half an hour on her own by bus every Sunday morning.
‘I was given children’s books to read on air. They would pay me some roubles, which I then gave to my mother, who needed them. I also wrote children’s stories and tried to get them published.’
It was at secondary school that she met – and fell in love with – her husband. ‘He is my first and my only,’ she smiles. ‘Armen was the best student at our school and I was the best actress. We did Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw plays – in English, because learning English was a big part of a communist education back then – and I always landed the main parts.
Armen was wowed by her father’s book collection and asked to borrow a volume of poetry, ‘which was against the rules, as my father hated loaning his books’. Fearing her father’s wrath if the tome was not returned, Nouneh tracked down Armen at school to retrieve it, ‘and this was how our friendship started,’ she explains.
They went together to Yerevan State University – Armen to study physics and Nouneh languages. Upon graduating, Armen was offered a position at Cambridge University. ‘He was invited 13 times by different universities before the communists allowed it.’
By the time he arrived in the UK in 1984, he and Nouneh were married with two sons, Vartan, now 36, and Hayk, 32. ‘Wives were not allowed to go abroad with Soviet scientists. We were kept behind as hostages. It was right after Hayk’s birth, so that was difficult. Moscow only allowed me to visit him for one month in April 1985.
‘I was 30 and when I arrived in London [en route to Cambridge] it was the first time I had ever been abroad. Before that, I had only travelled around the Soviet Union to places like Siberia, which are beautiful but, of course, all any of us wanted was to see London and Paris.
