Chess and Buddhism may seem, to the uninitiated, to have nothing in common beyond the fact that both require ferocious concentration and are practiced by serious-looking men in milk-bottle specs.
Yet today the connection will be strengthened when the opening ceremony of a series of matches between Veselin Topalov and Vladimir Kramnik, the title holders of international chess' two rival federations, is held in Elista, a small town roughly halfway between the Black Sea and the Caspian in the south-west Russian state of Kalmykia.
And Kalmykia, for those who have missed the pre-match hype, is Europe's only Buddhist nation. Or, to be more precise, its only Buddhist self-governing republic.
The history behind the Dalai Lama's spiritual presence in this unheralded corner of the continent goes back to Genghis Khan and his -- theoretically Buddhist -- hordes, descendants of whom settled in present-day Kalmykia in the early 17th century. A Western journalist who visited nearly 400 years later described the place as "more a state of mind," but it is a miracle that even that exists. Because, like "the meek" in the Life of Brian scene which sends up the Sermon on the Mount, the Kalmyks, who make up just over half the population of 292,000, have had a hell of a time.
They have been abolished by Catherine the Great, butchered by Bolsheviks, invaded by Nazis and exiled by Stalin before being allowed to return to their country by Khrushchev in 1957. By then, there were fewer than 70,000 Kalmyks left, and no Buddhist temples at all. And their mood was not helped when vast swathes of their country were reduced to desert by the sharp hooves of sheep imported from the nearby Caucasus mountains.
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