The Steppe, the Buddha, and the Chess King

Grandmothers murmured mantras under their breath and pretended they were just telling bedtime stories. Small statues of the Buddha got hidden away in old sugar boxes. That's what it looked like, saving an entire religion, in the middle of the twentieth century.

In nineteen forty-three, the entire Kalmyk people — more than ninety-three thousand people — were deported to Siberia. Their Buddhist temples, known as khuruls, were torn down, the monks persecuted. When Buddhism here started being pieced back together in the late eighties, almost no local monks were left. Teachers had to be brought in from other Buddhist regions of Russia, Buryatia and Tuva.

Picture this temple. The "Golden Abode of Buddha Shakyamuni" is the largest Buddhist temple in Europe, opened in two thousand five, right out on the flat open steppe. Inside stands a nine-meter statue of the Buddha, relics gifted by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and a hall lined with portraits of the persecuted monks. The architects aligned the building with the compass points, and laid a circular path around it for ritual walking. Locals joke that three laps count double: spiritual merit and a morning jog in one.

Now, about the chess. In the nineties, this region — Kalmykia, a Buddhist republic on Russia's steppe — was led by a man named Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who happened to be its president and, at the same time, president of the World Chess Federation. He built a whole "Chess City" out on the steppe and made local footballers play chess at training camp. As the story goes, an old shepherd at the market would explain grandmaster games using cavalry charges and flanking moves with a horse herd — and make more sense than the invited experts did.

Kalmykia is a place where Buddhism became more than a faith — it became the language a people used to survive. And out here, the steppe remembers all of it.

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