New Abstraction Chess

No matter how strange it may seem, very few chess pieces dated to the 17th–18th centuries have been found in Lithuania during archaeological excavations. Most of them were discovered in disturbed and mixed cultural layers, which makes dating very difficult. The number of these very rare game pieces currently does not even reach ten. Compared to the largest group of chess pieces dated to the late 14th–16th centuries, belonging to the new abstraction style, later chess pieces differed in their form. As Dr. Povilas Blaževičius notes, “the pieces stand out because the ratio between the diameter and height of their upper part ranges between 1:4 and 1:5. In other words, these profiled cylindrical pieces are tall and thin.”

 

The Palace of the Grand Dukes collection includes one new abstraction chess piece dated to the 17th–18th centuries. The report’s authors identified it as a pawn. The chess piece is 3.2 cm tall, turned from bone. The piece is intact, with a 0.7 cm base shaped as a narrowing cylinder, featuring a groove on top. The middle part is flask-shaped with a roller on top, and the upper part is drop-shaped. The chess piece was found in 2005 in an excavation area south of the First Office (now the main building of the Lithuanian National Museum), in the upper mixed soil layer.

 

This is one of two 17th–18th century chess pieces found in Vilnius and preserved in museums (the other, found in 2018, is kept at the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, https://www.jmuseum.lt/lt/naujienos/i/2243/menesio-eksponatas/). The size and shape of these chess pieces illustrate how the new abstraction style chess pieces evolved during the 17th–18th centuries.