The name of the island can be translated as Grey Monk Isle. The grey-clad monks lived on the island durig the Middle Ages and this century they came back.
With about 950 permanent inhabitants (far outnumbered by the tourist stream) it is the smallest of the inhabited Dutch “Waddeneilanden,” a string of islands north of the Netherlands.
It is very beautiful, with beaches that are among the widest in Europe. The eastern half of the island is completely uninhabited. I come there often, though it is quite a voyage. From Amsterdam, it is much easier to reach Paris than Schiermonnikoog.
My wife has a brother living there. My own connection to the Wadden is by another island, Terschelling. For generations the Ree’s were fishermen and, as I learned from an ancestor chart that was sent to me by a chess fan, many of them drowned near the Dogger Bank in the North Sea.
For reasons difficult to fathom, in 2018 Schiermonnikoog proclaimed itself the “first and only chess island in the world.” Their cheek was immediately rewarded by a video from Judit Polgar, who thanked the island, the mayor and the chairwoman of the Dutch Chess Federation for this noble initiative.
On the Willemshof, a garden square in the center of the village, there are two chess tables. The pieces are in a tree next to it in two birdhouses. Bad luck for the birds and hopefully a joy for the chessplayers, although in all the years I have visited the island, I have never seen anyone playing chess on those tables.
Somewhat outside the center of the village there is a large area where vegetables, fruit and flowers are grown. They cater to local restaurants, but also to individual fruit and grocery pickers.
Close to the entrance is a giant chess board with pieces. Of course. With a basket of self-picked chanterelles, it should be good to play chess. There used to be a chessboard like this in Amsterdam, not far from where I live. It was first chased away from the Max Euwe square and then from the Museum square, both times after complaints from bar owners about vagrant elderly chessplayers who chased away their customers.
In an Amsterdam council meeting it was said that the chessboard had attracted “people with unintelligible behavior and alcoholics.” I still wonder what “people with unintelligible behavior” is a euphemism for.
Close to the entrance to the cemetery, in the center of the village Schiermonnikoog, lies a large stone that marks the grave of Adriaan de Groot (1914-2006), who came to live on Schiermonnikoog in the 1970s.
Internationally De Groot had great influence on psychology through his book Thought and Choice in Chess, a translation of the Dutch Het denken van den schaker.
In 1939 he was a member of the Dutch team that participated in the 1939 Olympiad in Buenos Aires. Later he had a colleague at the University of Amsterdam, Johan Barendregt, who, like him, was a professor of psychology and also a strong chess player. They used to play a long series of blitz games and when after a long evening the score was drawn up, the loser had to bow and say solemnly, “You are my superior in chess.”
That is what Johan Barendregt told me, and he also said that despite his great international fame, Adriaan found it always hard to accept that he was not an international master and Johan was.
Adriaan once gave me one of the first books he wrote, Sint Nicolaas, patroon van liefde. It had appeared in 1949. An English translation appeared much later under the title Saint Nicholas: A Psychoanalytic Study of His History and Myth.
He said it was his favorite book, which I found interesting. In the Netherlands and internationally, De Groot was known as a hard methodologist, a friend of exact measurements, averse to soft psychobabble. And then, decades later, he considered this psychoanalytic study still his favorite book.
For a few years now, there has been another chess star on Schiermonnikoog. It is Carlijn Hagen, who was born on the island in 2009 and has already achieved national and even international successes. She travels to the mainland by boat almost every day, during the week to go to school or to the youth chess club De Paardensprong (Knight’s Jump) in Groningen. During the weekend she often goes to tournaments, sometimes together with her younger brother Maurits.
I had the privilege of meeting the children this year at the farm of their parents. They liked my visit too, because as the 13-year-old Maurits said, they had absolutely no serious chess opposition at the island.
Carlijn’s greatest international success was in 2023 at the European U-14 championship in the Austrian village of Mureck. She came second among the girls and in the general ranking of boys and girls she came sixth.
The game from that tournament below, against the German Hans Sihan Zhu, is certainly worth seeing, but far from flawless, no wonder for a thirteen-year-old. Her FIDE rating was 1338 then and now 1860, a huge jump in two years.
Click here to view Zhu-Hagen, U14 European Championship, Mureck 2023.