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Gukesh will defend his world title in a Geneva library-museum
The Fondation Martin Bodmer in Cologny, home to papyri and rare books, will host D Gukesh's match against Uzbekistan's Javokhir Sindarov from 22 November.
Key points
- The match will be played at the Fondation Martin Bodmer in Cologny, near Geneva.
- The first game is on 24 November; the match runs until 12 December.
- The prize fund is $2.5 million.
D Gukesh’s first defence of his world chess title will be played among some of the rarest books in the world. The match against Uzbekistan’s Javokhir Sindarov is set for the Fondation Martin Bodmer in Cologny, on the outskirts of Geneva, a venue that is half library and half museum.
The match runs from 22 November to 12 December, with the first game on 24 November. Gukesh, the defending champion, and Sindarov, who won this year’s Candidates Tournament in Cyprus, will both be 20 when it begins.
The prize fund is $2.5 million. Under FIDE’s rules, each player earns $200,000 for every game he wins, and the rest of the money is split equally between them.
A library built for the world
The foundation grew out of the collection of Martin Bodmer, a Zurich-born collector born in 1899, who set out to gather what he saw as the pillars of world literature, from Homer and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe. During the Second World War he worked with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva on an effort that collected and sent around 1.5 million books to prisoners of war.
Bodmer moved his library to Cologny after the war and gave it to a foundation in 1971. The present museum, designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, opened in 2003, paid for in part by the sale of a Michelangelo drawing. It now holds more than 150,000 documents, from ancient papyri to rare printed books, and its library is listed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.