A former instructor of military chemistry, he has spent the last twenty-one years making his living as a chess organizer, running monthly tournaments in Budapest and occasionally elsewhere as well. We had agreed to meet for him to show me around the tournament hall and to discuss my plans in town. “We [will] go to a restaurant to discuss our common actions,” he had written me, “you will have many chessfriends here.”

As I walked into the hotel conference room where the tournament was being held, I was immediately struck by the pervasive silence, broken only by the periodic clicking of chess clocks and the scratching of pens as players marked down their moves.

“Hello!” Laszlo whispered to me as I walked up. “And you are Jesse Schupack? Welcome to the First Saturday tournament.”

True to his word, I soon found myself eating a plate of vaguely Turkish fast food and taking the occasional sip of Hungarian fruity pseudojuice as we chatted and discussed our common actions. We talked about chess, about his years as a military chemist, the advantages of a career in chess over a career in the military, and my prospects for the upcoming tournament.

“Would you like a chess coach?” he asked. “I have a friend, he is a grandmaster, and I think he could be a good trainer for you.”

I affirmed that I would indeed like a chess coach, and after a few days of communication I found myself sitting across from Jozsef, a player with a rating that puts him almost in the top 500 among active players in the world. This, I thought to myself, was like taking batting lessons with a backup major league baseball player. Our first lesson consisted of a game in which he gauged my skill level followed by an analysis of the game and general chess discussion and instruction. We agreed to meet again after the tournament had started.

The next night, however, he was giving a two hour chess lecture at a Budapest chess club, and he invited me to come along. “One of my best students, an FM [FIDE Master - semi-pro-level chess player] will be there. I will pick him up from near here and I can pick you up in my car. He speaks English and he can help you understand.”

I doubted his student’s enthusiasm for being my personal translator, but I was intrigued and agreed to go. His student, it turns out, is seventeen years old, and with a rating twice as far removed from mine as from the number one player in the world.

On the way home the student’s phone rang, and he spoke for a few minutes before hanging up. It was his brother, calling with results from the Hungarian 14-and-under national championships. His brother had drawn against an opponent whom, apparently, he ought to have beaten.

“His opponent knew the best line,” the student told Jozsef. “He played nf6 and then after c5 g3 and bg2…”

I strained in a largely unsuccessful effort to follow the algebraic chess notation in my head, a feat that, for players of their level, is no more challenging than being able to give someone directions to your house without being able to look at a map.

“Yes,” Jozsef replied, “but his trainer [the opponent's] played that line in a tournament 24 years ago. He [the brother] should have expected him [the opponent] to pay it.” The student nodded, tsking the callowness of youth.

“This is already a lost position,” the grandmaster said, appraising the board at our next lesson. The previous day I had been obliterated in my second game of the tournament (after a respectable loss in the first), and we were reviewing the mistakes I had made.

“I could not beat your opponent in this position. Gary Kasparov could not beat him in this position. The game is over.”

The position from which even Kasparov could not recover as white.

I stared woefully at the board, my disappointment at the outcome of the game intensified by the fact that I had not even known how poorly I was doing.

“Even Gary….?” I started to ask.
“Yes,” he replied emphatically. “The position is totally lost.”

I look again at the board and shook my head, despondent that not only was my opponent so superior to me that he could devastate my position, I was so far beneath his skill level that I had not even known how badly I was losing.

As we continued to analyze the game, however, possibilities emerged for how I could have responded to my opponent’s opening. “Now you see,” Jozsef said, gesturing toward the position on the board, “his queen is on this side of the board and now you can attack here. We have a saying in Hungary…we say ‘when the cat is away, the mice…they are dancing.’”

I nodded, struck by the wisdom of Hungarian sages. It did not, however, help me win the third game.

St. Peter's Square, Vatican City

After a month in Malta that proved in some ways less than ideal, I continued on to Budapest, Hungary, stopping in Rome for almost a week en route.

St. Peter's Basilica

A significant portion of my time was devoted to the standard tourist fare, but a project-oriented opportunity unexpectedly arose.

Michelangelo's Pieta, St. Peter's Basilica

Through a friend-of-friend connection, I found myself one morning in the basement of St. Paul’s Within the Walls – the first non-Catholic church built in the city, run by the Anglican/Episcopal church. The basement level of the church has been converted into an international refugee center, which offers services to political refugees coming from across the map – Central Africa, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and many more countries.

St. Peter's Square, from the dome of the Basilica

Though I wish I could say my motives were entirely the product of a desire to serve, I was driven also by the enticement of being told that, in addition to the services the center provides the refugees, they are given also a large recreational area to spend the morning and early afternoon in if they wish to stay off the streets. In the rec room they are provided with a television, ping pong equipment, foosball tables…and board games.

Mosaic at Santa Prassede

After helping serve breakfast I was left to my own devices by the priest who had invited me. I wandered around for a while, listening for English or Russian and looking for people playing games. Several groups of people were playing checkers. As a matter of personal preference, I wanted to play chess. After awkwardly circulating for a few minutes, I walked over to an empty table and began setting up chess pieces on a board, hoping someone would see and come to play. It wasn’t a particularly clever idea, and it seemed at first not to work. Sensing that I was not being noticed, I abandoned the board and began walking again, wondering how I ought to go about initiating a game of some sort.

The Vatican Museum

A moment later, however, I turned around and noticed a man, probably in his early 20s, standing over the chess board. He began fiddling with the pieces and looking around. I quickly made my way over and pounced. “Would you like to play?” I asked, gesturing toward the board. He nodded, and so we carried the set over to a table with chairs.

Janiculum Hill

Immediately after we sat down he began to rearrange the pieces somewhat arbitrarily.
“We’re playing…chess?” I asked him.
“Yes, chess,” he replied, barely looking up from his shuffling. I hesitated and watched as he began to count the pieces on each side.

After verifying that each side had sixteen pieces, he took my queen and a bishop, and both of his knights.
“There,” he said, seeming satisfied, “now we both have fourteen.”

One of us, I reasoned, had certainly misunderstood the other. “We’re playing chess?” I asked again.
“Yes, yes, we are playing chess,” he answered.

St. Paul's Outside the Walls

He then began methodically rearranging the pieces on each side in what was now recognizably the layout for a game of checkers, though with each side having an extra row of pieces.
“Ah,” I said, “so we are playing checkers?”
“Yes, yes” he said. “Checkers.”
I was beginning to lose confidence in whether or not genuine communication was taking place.

“Where are you from?” I asked, hoping to generate some conversation.
“Aghanistan,” he answered, staring intensely at the board and seeming uninterested in further pleasantries.

Castel Sant Angelo

Not having played checkers more than a handful of times in the last ten years, I tried to focus my attention, suspecting that my opponent had played often while at the center. It quickly became apparent, however, that we were playing neither chess not checkers, but a largely arbitrary variation of checkers that seemed designed to minimize all inhibitions on gameplay. Midway through the first game my opponent suddenly began moving his pieces backwards. Confused, I watched for a few turns to see if there was some special rule that governed when he was allowed to do so. There seemed to be none, and so I quickly followed suit.

The Pantheon

Eventually we had only a few pieces each, and after stumbling around for a few moves I found a tactic that allowed me to win. He moved to reset the pieces, and we began a second game.

Piazza Navona

This time I played with our unorthodox rules from the beginning, and was able to win without much difficulty. After getting to a position in which he could not move any of his pieces without my capturing them, my new friend resigned. “Ok,” he said, smiling widely. “You are very clever. I will go now.” And with that he stood and walked out with a friend who had come over midway through the second game.

Raphael's The School of Athens, Vatican Museum

I watched a few other games and observed that all, as best I could tell, were following the standard rules exactly. Confused and amused, I went in search of gelato.

A few weeks into my stay in Sofia I decided to make a brief trip up to Bansko in southwest Bulgaria. After initially being a bit slow on the uptake, some very clever Ponzi schemers businessmen realized that if you take a beautiful, pristine mountain and put it through an intensive process of commercialization and development in order to advertise how pristine it is, you can sucker a lot of people into investing in real estate in order to build prefab condominiums that no one will want to move into because the area is suddenly very overdeveloped.

All of this is not to say that I resisted the urge to go on a ski trip – to ski, and also to see more of the country.

Upon arriving and checking into my outrageously cheap hotel, I went in search of a ski rental shop. Midway along the fifteen minute walk between the hotel and the base of the ski slopes I walked by a mehana, the Bansko variant of which bears as much resemblance to an authentic old Bulgarian tavern as Cracker Barrel does to an authentic old Southern diner. The town was full of them, most with touts outside trying to lure in unsuspecting Westerners. This one was no exception.

“Hello my friend!” a middle-aged Bulgarian greeted me. I nodded and mumbled something. “Would you like to eat?” he said. “I will give you a free drink.”
“No thank you,” I said. “I’ve already eaten.” (This was a lie.)
“Come on my friend, I will give you wine–or beer! Have a drink! We serve traditional Bulgarian foods!”
I decided to leverage the situation in my favor. “Maybe later,” I said. “Right now I need to rent skis. Do you know a good place?”
He brightened. “Yes, of course. But you do not want to go to the ski lift. If you rent there it will be very expensive. But there is an excellent shop around the corner.” He led me to the side of his restaurant to a cramped, dim wooden shed with a meager assortment of cheap-looking skis. In a moment of naivete, I thanked him and went in.

“What does he want?” the worker in the shop asked.
“ENGLISH!” the tavern worker answered with a curious sharpness before catching himself and turning to me with a smile. “This man speaks English. He needs skis.” He turned and left me in the shop. Before I knew what was happening I had been smoothly convinced to rent a pair of mediocre skis and cheap boots for several days. I left my driver’s license as a deposit and uneasily exited the shop. As I gained distance from the haze-inducing aura of the tavern-worker’s salesmanship I began to question my choice.

I walked on to the base of the ski slope and the ludicrous agglomeration of ski rental shops clustered around it. Immediately upon entering the first shop and seeing the price list–and the very respectable skis being rented out–I realized I had made a very big mistake. The first shop, I realized, made its profits not by being further away from the slopes and thus keeping its prices lower, but by being further away from the slopes and thus snaring tourists before they encounter the broader market of ski rentals. I had been suckered in effortlessly, but I reasoned that, having not paid and not used the skis there was, in theory, no reason why I could not cancel my rental. And then I remembered that I had left my license at the shop, and suddenly I doubted my strength of will to resist the inevitable pressuring I would experience. I paced around for a few minutes before finally gathering the resolve necessary and walking into the shop.

Sitting at the desk was an old man who hadn’t been there before. After ten minutes of gesturing I finally communicated to him that I didn’t want skis after all but would very much like to have my identification back. Relieved to be rid of me, he complied without argument, and I considered myself lucky beyond reckoning.

The next day I found myself skiing down a narrow route that went along a chair lift. At one slightly technical bottleneck I wound up standing next to two older British men. The first one went down the section smoothly. The second hesitated and turned to me, indicating that I ought to go first. I made it down and paused to rest for a moment, and the first man and I chatted as we waited for the second to come down.

“So where are you from?” he asked.
“America.”
“Oh…so how long are you here for?”
“A few days.”
He stared at me. “And…you came from where in America, exactly?” he asked in disbelief.
“Oh no,” I said, “I’ve been in Sofia for a few weeks. I just came up here for a short trip.” Anxious to avoid an overly long explanation of myself, I turned the tables. “And what about you?”
“I’m British.”
“And what do you do?”
“Well, I learned to ski while in the Royal Marines. Now I’m in asbestos removal.”
I pondered this. “And…are you here on holiday?”
“No, no,” the man said very seriously, “I’m spending the season here. I wanted to work on my off-piste skiing.”

I paused to absorb what he had just said. A variety of burning questions came to mind: Why are you doing that? Why do you consider that a worthwhile way to spend a half year of your life? Does that really have any practical application to any other aspect of your life? What’s so important about off-piste skiing? Doesn’t that seem like a pretty over-privileged way to spend your winter?

And then I stopped and considered how I might answer those same questions about how I myself was currently spending my year. All in a moment I understood the numerous silent, quizzical looks I’d received over the course of the year. Suddenly I felt uncomfortable. “Well it’s been nice meeting you,” I said. “Good luck with that.”

And I turned and skied away, absorbed in self-justification.

The Balkans in Janary: Just Say No. Literally without exception every Bulgarian to whom I have described my project has responded with shock and some comment to the effect of “But why did you come here? And why now?!” My feeble attempts at explanation were never found to be particularly convincing.

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

Still, Sofia has a lot going for it – though it’s best experienced in the summertime. The public transportation is cheap and efficient, the currency is tied to the euro and thus relatively stable. (Relatively.) The bland Soviet-style architecture is broken up by the occasional gem (or at least semiprecious stone). Alexander Nevsky Cathedral (above) is impressive by any standard.

I'm not sure I've ever seen subway stations as bleak as those in Sofia.

Beyond such trivial observations, Bulgaria is, like so much of eastern Europe, a fascinating fusion of communist residue and the ever-encroaching influence of western Europe. One can easily ride an ancient, decrepit tram through a mesmerizing, bleak fractal-like suburb of gray apartment buildings only to get off in front of a chintzy, massive shopping mall complete with an IMAX theater, Starbucks, and Carrefour. Bulgarians have made admirable and enthusiastic strides toward adopting all of the trappings of Western consumerism.

And how has my project been going? There was very little project-related that happened in Sofia. The initial portion of my stay was consumed by acquiring the necessary accessories for staying warm when the evenings dropped into the single digits and familiarizing myself with the city. For the first time this year I’ve been living well outside the city center, and until I figured out the public transportation system I was limited to fatiguing forty-five minute walks into town. Once things settled down I got to work trying to pursue two leads – a chess cafe and a local business high school that had instituted chess as a part of the curriculum.

The school took me a long time to track down because the one article that had been written about it (and copied onto dozens of other websites around the web) misspelled the name. When I finally tracked it down I was unable to contact them. The cafe, too, had mixed results. I found the building but was informed that it has not existed for six months. After a frantic period of finding a place to live in Malta, a brief ski trip to Bansko (to be recounted in a separate post), and spending a few days meeting up with friends of friends–”I wish I could help you, but there’s nothing to do here”–my time was essentially finished. So now I’m off to Malta, where warm weather and English speakers await. We shall see.

I chose to live slightly dangerously, staying in Turkey all the way through the 90th day of my visa. I counted and counted and recounted until I was sure that January 25th was the 90th day after October 28th, when I arrived. Once I was confident enough in that, I booked my plane ticket to Sofia for January 25th. Had some issue arisen that caused me to miss my flight, I might have been in a very tight spot indeed. But I had paid rent through the 28th, and I wanted to waste as little of it as possible.

I got to the airport without issue a few hours before my flight, checked in, and then proceeded to passport control. I gave the man at the counter my passport and tried to act casual as he flipped through it looking for my visa sticker. He found it and immediately froze, leaned back in his seat, and started counting numbers on his fingers. After a moment he collected himself and looked up before rattling off a sentence in Turkish.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t speak Turkish. Do you speak English?”

He looked at me for a moment. “You do not speak Turkish?” I nodded. “Well, Mr. Schupack, what have you been doing in Turkey?”

“An academic project,” I answered.

He looked at me doubtfully. “Do you have any documentation?” I thought for a moment, and then remembered a Watson Fellowship ID card I had been carrying in my wallet for six months. It was faded and scratched, and hadn’t looked particularly impressive to begin with. I pulled it out and handed it to him, and he looked at it briefly before handing it back. “Do you have any official, TURKISH documentation? A residency permit?”

“No,” I answered, “I don’t.”

“Well isn’t that in-ter-es-ting?” he asked. I didn’t reply but looked very intently at a curiously deep crease midway up his forehead. After an awkward silence he continued. “And what was your project about?”

If ever there was a time when I didn’t want to try to explain and justify that I have been funded to spend a year studying board game cultures, it was then.

“Turkish culture,” I answered.

He sneered. “You’ve been in Turkey for 90 days studying Turkish culture, and you don’t speak Turkish?”

I nodded meekly, recognizing that his condescension might actually have been justified. He continued to look at me.

“Well isn’t that interesting? I hope you have a good flight…Mr. Schupack.”

Trotsky's former home in exile, on the island of Buyukada off the coast of Istanbul.

Boat docks on the Bosphorus at dusk.

Knowing that I would have visitors in January, I have largely restrained myself from visiting Istanbul’s major sites so as to avoid going to, say, the Hagia Sophia three different times. My first visitor, Linda, was in town for the first week of January, which we began with a whirlwind day trip to the ruins of Ephesus and the nearby touristy town, Selçuk. We began by briefly wandering through the narrow pedestrian-only streets of Selçuk. Almost immediately my attention was drawn to a small display of traditional Turkish backgammon boards outside of a shop. After months of resisting buying boards in every country I’ve visited, I had begun to feel tempted by some of the backgammon boards I had seen in Istanbul, and was open to the possibility of buying one. Of the boards on display, however, none caught my eye, and we prepared to leave. Just then an employee came out.

Just outside the gates of Ephesus.

“You’re interested in the backgammon boards?” he asked.
“No thanks–just looking,” I replied, and we kept walking away.
“If you beat me you can have one,” he called after us. As we walked on the weight of his words slowly sank in.
“Jesse,” Linda finally said, “you just turned down the chance to play backgammon with a Turkish man. We have to go back.”

After dodging a few more harassing salesmen we returned to the first store and feigned interest in the wares on display. This time the only worker was the store keeper, who introduced himself as Ali as he ushered us inside the shop.

The Library of Celsus, Ephesus

He insisted that we drink tea with him, using the opportunity to discuss the state of his profession. Other shopkeepers, we were told, sell craftsmanship of the second quality at prices that he, as a salesman of crafts of only the highest quality, cannot compete with.

“They wrote an article about me in the newspaper,” he suddenly said. “This woman, from the government, she came and visited…” he trailed off as he went into the back room to fetch something. He came back with a crinkled newspaper opened to a page in the middle. “She came and she saw my shop and she wrote about it,” he continued, gesturing to the picture of himself at the top of article. “She said she wishes that every shop was like my shop.” He continued to describe the infelicities suffered be a vendor of true craftsmanship. “Other people, they think it’s okay to bargain,” he said, “but you see everything in my shop has a price. I am honest.” We nodded along, dropping empathetic comments at appropriate moments. As he concluded his disquisition he asked if there was anything I might be interested in looking at samples of. I hesitated, unsure of what I might be getting myself into. “Well,” I finally allowed, “I do like backgammon.”

Ali’s eyes lit up. “Of course,” he said, and he began pulling board after board from a shelf and laying them out in a line on the counter. The busy array of multi variegated mosaics was dizzying, and none quite matched my aesthetic tastes. “How much are these?” I asked, stepping further into the dungeon. “Well, my friend, like I said, I am honest. Other people bargain, but in my shop,” he said, repeating his mantra from earlier, “everything has a price on it. These ones–” he pointed to the largest boards, “these are 250 liras.” He indicated the sticker to that effect. “But you are friends, we have had tea together. For you, only 220.” Overwhelmed by the blatant absurdity of what he had just said, we nodded.

Ephesus

“Thank you so much,” I said, “but I’ll have to think about it.”
“Oh but of course,” Ali replied, “take as much time as you need. Please come back. But you do not have to. If you don’t want to buy from me, don’t buy from me. If you want to buy cheaper boards somewhere else, buy somewhere else.” The reverse psychology was simultaneously transparent and compelling. I nodded and looked again at the boards.

“Would you like to play with me?” he asked. I assented.

Ali fetched three stools and a small table upon which he set up a display board. As we laid out the pieces he seemed to be sizing me up. I confidently took my pieces and began arranging them on the board. Seeing that I knew where to put them, he asked “You’ve played backgammon before?” I confirmed that I had. “Have you played very much?” I shrugged. “I’ve played some.” Ali was satisfied.

We began playing. Despite having observed countless games of backgammon on my Watson Fellowship, I had only actually played once in the last several years. Slightly rusty on strategy, I fell a little behind in the opening. My initial fear that Ali would throw the game in order to further entice me soon dissolved as he leaned in intently, playing aggressively and getting a few lucky rolls. “Good for me, bad for you” he would say each time a roll fell in his favor, and “bad for me, good for you” he would sigh each time I was lucky with the dice.

At around the midpoint of the game I began to remember my strategies and simultaneously began getting better rolls. Ali leaned in more closely, and the tension was palpable. The game tightened up somewhat at the end, but I managed to win with a little room to spare. As I moved my last pieces off the board Ali stared blankly for a moment before shaking his head and looking up. “Play again?” he asked. I politely declined, to savor my victory and to hasten our escape. After leaving him with reassurances that we would return, Linda and I were finally able to extract ourselves.

Selcuk

After visiting the Ephesus ruins we had several hours left until we needed to catch our shuttle back to the airport, and we wandered through the area again, pondering whether we wanted to go back to the shop on the chance that we actually would find something we wanted to buy. In the midst of discussing the question we looked up and suddenly realized that we were immediately outside the shop. “Jesse,” Linda began, “I don’t think we’re ready for–”

But it was too late. Having spotted us outside, Ali immediately pounced. “How are you?” he asked. “Did you visit Ephesus? Are you back to look?” We reluctantly followed him back inside, and were soon sipping Turkish tea and desperately hoping to find something small and cheap to buy to assuage our unjustifiably guilty consciences. Most of the touristy trinkets were utterly unappealing, and I decided to give him one last chance. I mentioned that I might not mind looking at some of the boards again, and Ali redoubled his previous efforts, filling the entire counter with boards. I at first despaired as the boards were all either obscenely large and obscenely expensive or simply unappealing. Finally, however, I found exactly what I had been envisioning.

“I like this one,” I said. “How much is it?”
“Well,” Ali answered carefully, “everything in my shop has a price on it–that is how I do business…But you are friends, so for you I do discount.” After settling on an agreeable price we began to make ready to leave the shop with the board.

“Would you like to look at Turkish scarves?” Ali asked, beginning to pull a stack off the shelf. “I have many to choose from. My prices are very good, and because you are friends–”
“Thank you,” Linda and I said simultaneously, “but we are in a hurry and we need to leave.”

As I walked away from the shop, thinking alternately of the game we had played and the board I was now carrying, I began to wonder if perhaps Ali had won after all.

The spoils

The Hagia Sophia at dusk

In mid November I had someone ship me a small package from the U.S. It was sent by express mail, with a 3-5 day estimated delivery. Four days after it was mailed the Turkish online tracking system showed that it had arrived in-country. Six days later (the 10th day from mailing) the tracking system indicated that the package was being held in customs. Another ten days after that (the 20th day from mailing) I finally received a slip in the mail informing me to go to the package center in order to pick it up from customs.

The customs office is housed in a nondescript drab building off of the main highway in Istanbul, about 20 minutes from the city center. Inside is a long, dilapidated hallway lined with numbered counters on both sides. As I stepped inside a man at an unnumbered counter on the left asked me something in Turkish. I mumbled a reply in English and handed him my package slip.

“Number 1,” he said in Turkish. I walked up to the first counter and gave the man my slip and passport. He pulled out a very large crate full of slips of paper and began rummaging through it somewhat at random. At length he sighed, handed me back my slip, and told me to go to counter number 9.

At counter 9 I waited a few minutes in line and then handed the man my slip. He looked at it for a minute and then told me to go to counter 1. “I was just at counter 1,” I told him in English, “and they said to come here.” He stared at me blankly and responded in Turkish. I tried, unsuccessfully, to use motions to convey my meaning. Suddenly a slick-haired young Turkish man in a yellow leather jacket and pointy suede shoes stepped up and began speaking with the man behind the counter. After a minute he turned to me and said, in English, that I was to go to counter 5.

At counter 5 the man looked at my slip and immediately instructed me to go to counter 1. The yellow-jacket-sporting man standing nearby assured me that this was, in fact, what I ought to do, and he kindly led me back down the hall, muttered something to the man at the desk, and then left me. The man at counter 1 pulled out the box of slips again and this time somehow magically came up with a piece of paper for me. He told me to go to counter 5. At counter 5 the man took my new piece of paper, rummaged through shelves of packages, and without finding anything pointed me to counter 6. At counter 6 the man took my two slips of paper, disappeared for a few moments, and came back with my package. He gave me yet another slip of paper and indicated that I was to go to a nearby desk. At the desk another man pulled out a sheet of paper, filled out some figures, and then sent me to counter 1 to pay duty. At counter 1 I presented the man with the new sheet of paper, and he in turn pulled out another sheet of paper, stamped it, and instructed me to proceed to counter 2. At counter 2 I paid my taxes and returned to counter 5, where I was mysteriously charged again (this time a trivial fee of slightly over $1). Too exhausted to protest or question, I paid it. I then returned to counter 6, presented my stack of slips, and was, finally, given my package.