Yane Sandanski
Sandanski was born in the village of Vlahi near Kresna in Ottoman Empire on May 18, 1872. His father Ivan participated as a standard-bearer in the Kresna-Razlog Uprising. After the crush of the uprising, in 1879 his family moved to Dupnitsa, Bulgaria, where Sandanski received his elementary education. From 1892 to 1894 he was a soldier in the Bulgarian army. Sandanski was an active supporter of the Radoslavov's wing of the Liberal Party and shortly after it came to power in February 1899, he was appointed head of the Dupnitsa Prison. Because of that, his name ""Sandanski"" distorted from ""Zindanski"" that comes from Turkish ""Zindancı"" (lit. "Dungeon Keeper" or "Jailer").
Yane Sandanski was involved in the Revolutionary Movement in Macedonia and Thrace and became one of its leaders. He joined initially the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee (SMAC) in 1895 during an incursion into the Muslim-inhabited regions of the central Rhodopes ìn Thrace. In the next five years, Sandanski was a SMAC activist in the Pirin region, but in 1900 returned to become a director of the local prison in Dupnitsa. In 1901, Sandanski switched to the Internal Macedono-Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Organization (IMARO). He built up the organization’s network of committees in the districts of Serres and Gorna Dzhumaja in the Pirin region, and that is why the people gave him the nickname "PirinTsar" (Pirinski Tsar). He was also one from the organizers of the Miss Stone Affair - America's first modern hostage crisis. On September 3, 1901, a Protestant missionary named Ellen Stone set out on horseback across the mountainous hinterlands of Macedonia and was ambushed by a band of armed revolutionaries. Sandanski was also active in the anti-Ottoman Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising. The Militias active in the region of Serres, led by Yane Sandanski and an insurgent detachment of the "Macedonian Supreme Committee", held down a large Turkish force. These actions began on the day of the Feast of the Cross and did not involve the local population as much as in other regions, but were well to the east of Monastir and to the west of Thrace.
Andrei Sannikov
Andrei Sannikov was born on 8 March 1954 in the city of Minsk. His father was a well-known Belarusian art researcher while his mother was a teacher of the Russian language. His grandfather Konstantin Sannikov was a well-known actor and film director in the Byelorussian SSR, one of founders of the Janka Kupala National Theatre, and a teacher at the Belarusian Theater and Art Institute in Moscow. Sannikov first attended school #42 as a boy, and in 1977 he graduated from Minsk State Linguistic University. He is fluent in his native Belarusian, Russian, English, and French.