A Bulgarian chess grandmaster, born on 11 September 1945 and died on 25 September 2008. He won the Bulgarian junior championship in 1962, the national championship in 1973 and 1978, and took the grandmaster title in 1975. He represented Bulgaria at two Chess Olympiads and nine Balkaniads.

Is Bulgaria a serious chess country?

Very. Kirov came through a system of junior, student, European team and Balkan competitions that was funded as a sport rather than treated as a pastime, and Bulgaria has produced strong players consistently since. Club chess is still widely played at town level.

Where can I play chess as a newcomer?

Parks and cafes in most towns, and the local chitalishte, the community cultural centre, which often has a club. No Bulgarian is required to start a game, which makes it one of the easier ways to meet people early on.

On This Day in Bulgaria: Nino Kirov, and Why This Country Makes Grandmasters (25 September), Shumen.UK

📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Friday 25 September

Britain has produced perhaps a dozen chess grandmasters in its history. Bulgaria, a country of under seven million, has produced them steadily for decades, and Nino Kirov was one of the better ones. He died on this date in 2008.

What happened on this day

Nino Kirov Ivanov was born on 11 September 1945 and won the Bulgarian junior championship at seventeen, in 1962. He took the international master title in the early seventies, the two Wikipedia entries disagreeing by a year on exactly when, and the grandmaster title in 1975. He was Bulgarian champion twice, in 1973 and 1978, and he was still strong enough at forty-seven to reach his career-best rating of 2505 in January 1993.

He played two Olympiads for Bulgaria, at Nice in 1974 and Thessaloniki in 1984. The first went very well and the second did not: across the two he played seventeen games for seven wins, eight draws and two losses, and every one of those wins came in Nice. He also turned out nine times in the Balkaniads between 1974 and 1985, collecting a gold, four silvers and four bronzes with the team and three individual golds along the way, and won or shared first at tournaments from Serbia to Poland to Greece.

That is a career, and it is worth pausing on what produced it. Kirov came up inside a system that ran junior championships, student team championships, European team events and an annual Balkan tournament, all of it state-funded, all of it treating chess as a sport a country competes in rather than a hobby. Britain had nothing comparable, which is most of the explanation for the numbers at the top of this piece.

Towns celebrating today

Dobrich marks its city day, the ninth-largest city in Bulgaria and the capital of Southern Dobrudzha, thirty kilometres inland from the coast and an easy run from Albena and Balchik. It takes its name from the medieval lord Dobrotitsa. The thing to see is the Old Dobrich ethnographic complex, a reconstructed street of working craft workshops rather than a museum you walk past.

Why this matters for British expats

Chess is one of the easier ways into Bulgarian social life, and it is almost the only one that does not require the language. Boards come out in parks, in cafes and in the chitalishte in most towns of any size, the etiquette is universal, and an opponent who beats you will usually want to show you why afterwards, which is a conversation you can have in about forty words of Bulgarian and a lot of pointing. If you are looking for a way to be a participant rather than a spectator in the town you have moved to, our guide to settling into a Bulgarian community covers the broader version of the same idea. Dobrich, incidentally, is close enough to Shumen to make a straightforward day out for anyone in this part of the country.

If you want the practical companion read, the Shumen.UK money guide sits next to this one.

Sources and further reading

The titles, championships and Olympiad scores come from the English Wikipedia entry on Nino Kirov, with the Bulgarian entry supplying his peak rating and a fuller tournament record. Where the two disagree on a year, this piece says so rather than picking one.