Author: David Blackman
Date: 00:48:52 09/18/01
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On September 17, 2001 at 15:28:38, Rajen Gupta wrote: >i recently visited the chessbase site where the participants and their countries >were listed. > >under europe were listed; georgia and israel. pardon my ignorance but i thought >both these countries are in asia? as is armenia and azerbaijan, thereby making >kasparov the first world champion from asia and not anand.or does a caucasian >background automatically make one a european? > >rajen Israel is in Asia. They tend to get put in Europe for sporting purposes since a lot of Asian countries don't have diplomatic relations with Israel, which can make it tricky for Israel to take part in Asian competitions. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are kind of on the border between Europe and Asia. The border was traditionally supposed to be the Caucasus mountains, which goes right through that region. Look at a map to see exactly where. I vaguely remember them being described as European 30 years ago but Asian more recently. (Linguistically, Georgia is Persian, Azerbaijan is Turkic, and Armenia is Armenian, which probably gives them stronger ethnic and linguistic links to Asia than Europe, but that's another story.)
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