Hello Guy, Thanks for the review of the exhibition! If there is enough interest, a gift shop would be added. It would sell souvenirs like postcards, shirts, and hats. Edward In a message dated 8/31/2013 10:44:40 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, guywhitehouse1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes: I have just come back from a holiday in Iceland where I got the chance to visit an exhibition on the 1972 Fischer-Spassky world championship match. I had been made aware of the existence of this exhibition by a member of this group, Edward Zolotarevsky during the course of two friendly games we are playing. The exhibition was originally opened in Selfoss where Fischer was buried, but then moved to the Reykjavik hotel that Fischer stayed in for the duration of the match, now called Hotel Natura. It is relatively small in scale; it does not for example go into great detail on Fischer’s and Spassky’s entire chess career. However what is on display is likely to be of interest to the genuine chess enthusiast. The exhibition starts with the text of some newspaper articles printed before the match started and with an explanation of why the match was considered to be of such importance. There is mention of the fact that a BBC poll actually voted the match as one of the greatest sporting events of the century (number 10, apparently). I certainly hadn’t known that before I visited the exhibition. The exhibition then moves on to the match itself. You can see the pieces used, some tickets from the match, a spoon designed to commemorate the match in the shape of a chess piece. There are also postcards with the final position of each game displayed as a graphic and with the official Icelandic stamp designed to commemorate the event imprinted on them. There are also some Icelandic stamps with a Bobby Fischer portrait on them and a couple of other portraits of the players looking thoughtful and sitting at the board. Unfortunately for a visually impaired person all of this material is locked away in cabinets, and the hotel staff were not willing to unlock these cabinets for me. However they were prepared to lift the cover off the table and board actually used for the match. The chairs used by both players are also present, and there are three pictures of me sitting in one of these chairs and with my hands on the board (autographed by both Fischer and Spassky). This was, from a purely personal point of view, the highlight of the exhibition. The exhibition finishes with a brief mention of the grant of Icelandic citizenship to Fischer in 2005; you can see the text of the official letter. It rather glosses over the controversies surrounding the reasons for Fischer’s application for Icelandic citizenship; for example the sighted guide with me didn’t make mention of Fischer’s rather appalling comments on the attack on the World Trade Centre. There is a picture of Fischer walking in the rift valley where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates on which Iceland rests are moving apart. Finally the exhibition mentions Fischer’s burial place in the Laugardalur church at Selfoss (as it happens, the group I was with drove passed this, but because we were an hour behind due to a tyre burst we didn’t get a chance to stop and take a look). Overall being able to get to this exhibition was one of the highlights of a great holiday for me. It was very disappointing that I couldn’t find any kind of memento of the match to buy in Reykjavik; I had to go looking on ebay where there are some of the postcards for sale (I should confess I am something of a sucker for that sort of thing). There is actually some controversy surrounding this topic. Someone had suggested putting some sort of tourist centre at Selfoss, but this was opposed by local people on the grounds that Fischer came to Selfos to find peace and it would be an intrusion; you can understand this, particularly as there would be a risk that any tourist centre near to the grave would intrude on other people using the church as a place of worship. However I was slightly disappointed (and given the state of Iceland’s economy, surprised) that there wasn’t anything to take away from the exhibition itself, even if the photos I mentioned earlier will be something to treasure. ========== The blind-chess mailing list View list information and change your settings: //www.freelists.org/list/blind-chess List archives: //www.freelists.org/archives/blind-chess =========