A Phoenix on the Adriatic: How Montenegro Keeps Resurrecting the Mediterranean Chess Championship

Every chess country has its open. We have ours (quick plug: the Andorra Open, you know where to find it). But there is one title in our corner of the chess world that behaves less like a tournament and more like a mythological creature: it appears, it dazzles, it dies, it vanishes for years… and then, just when everyone has filed it under "nice idea, RIP," it rises from the ashes.

That creature is the Mediterranean Chess Championship. And this July, on the Adriatic coast, it is rising again, for the second time, lit by the very same hands. But before I spoil the ending (too late?), let me walk you through the strange, stop-start life of the most resurrection-prone trophy in our region.

1. A Sea of Good Intentions

The story starts not on a beach but in a meeting room. The Mediterranean Chess Association (MCA) was born at the 73rd FIDE Congress in Bled, Slovenia, back in 2002, and was duly registered as a FIDE-affiliated international organization. The concept was lovely: gather the chess players of the Mediterranean federations, plus a few invited guests, into a Swiss-system championship that would hop around the basin, crowning a Mediterranean Champion and a Mediterranean Women's Champion each year.

The first edition landed in Beirut in 2003, with Greece's Kapnisis and France's Silvia Collas taking the inaugural crowns. And for a while, it genuinely worked. Look at this run:

Seven editions, basically annual, bouncing from Lebanon to Turkey to France to Tunisia to Croatia. The honour roll alone tells you how cosmopolitan it was: Greece, Turkey, Croatia, Egypt, France, Slovenia, Montenegro. Suat Atalık went back-to-back in 2005 and 2006, and a young Egyptian named Ahmed Adly showed up in 2009 to remind everyone that the chess centre of gravity in this region was quietly shifting south.

2. Mind the Gap(s)

Here is where the pulse starts skipping. If you look at the official records, several editions carry a little asterisk noting they were "organized at the beginning of the following year." When even the calendar can't keep its own story straight, you know you're dealing with a special kind of event.

After that golden run, the cracks appeared:

• 2010 and 2011: nothing. Two years, no championship.
• 2012: the 8th edition resurfaces in Beirut (Jwan Bakr of Syria takes it).
• 2013: silence again.
• 2014: the 9th in Chania, where Egypt's Bassem Amin lifts the trophy, reportedly on his birthday, which is the kind of detail you cannot make up.
• 2015: the 10th in Beirut, Ahmed Adly champion again.

And then came the big one. After Beirut 2015… nothing for six years. 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020: five blank editions in a row. Part organizational fatigue, part the simple difficulty of getting a dozen federations to agree on who hosts and when, and then, as a grand finale, a global pandemic to slam the door on whatever momentum was left. By the end of 2020, the Mediterranean Championship was, for all intents and purposes, dead.

3. The First Resurrection

In 2021, in the Adriatic town of Petrovac, the Montenegro Chess Federation did something nobody else had managed in half a decade: it brought the thing back to life. The 11th Mediterranean Championship shared its venue and prize fund with the European School Chess Cup (a smart bit of logistics) and offered a total fund of around €10,500. Croatia's Ivan Šarić and Greece's Stavroula Tsolakidou were crowned champions.

Read that timeline again. A six-year coma. A pandemic. And the event came back not because one of the big, wealthy federations decided to bankroll it, but because a small Adriatic nation simply refused to let it stay buried. That is the phoenix moment, so file it away, because it matters in a minute.

The revival even held for two more editions, Cairo in 2022 and Platja d'Aro in 2023, but both came wrapped in their own special brand of chaos. Which is the perfect moment to admit that by then I wasn't watching from the stands anymore: I'd joined the party myself.

4. Your Blogger Crashes the Mediterranean Party

Up to now I've been narrating from the sidelines. Time to come clean: your favourite blogger eventually joined the Mediterranean party himself, and got a front-row seat to both the best and the worst of what this championship can be.

First, my Mediterranean debut: the 12th edition, Cairo 2022, where 19-year-old IM Dimitris Alexakis ran away with the title on a convincing 8/9. The chess was excellent, and the organizers deserve real credit for getting the event on at all, because the timing could hardly have been crueller. It collided with COP27, yes, that COP27, the enormous UN climate summit Egypt was hosting at the very same moment. With the whole country's logistics bent around welcoming half the world's heads of state, the championship needed a late venue change. The Egyptian federation has a long and genuinely impressive record of running international events, and this time they were simply handed an impossible week. Honestly, you try staging an international championship while every world leader on the planet is in town.

Then came my second campaign, the 13th edition, Platja d'Aro 2023, this time right on our doorstep and bolted onto the Catalan championship we contest every single year anyway. Spain's Pedro Ginés and Greece's Evanthia Makka took the titles.

And if Petrovac 2021 showed a federation at its best, Platja d'Aro showed one at its worst. In my view, the Catalan Federation took on the event for exactly one reason: to raise money to fund their own "National" championship. The incompetence then spoke for itself. Pedro Ginés, the Mediterranean champion, had been invited precisely as a player qualified for the Catalan national title, and was then somehow not crowned national champion, because the Catalan Federation has a proud tradition of ignoring its own rules whenever it suits them. And, naturally, there was a little extra hospitality reserved for the Andorran players: we were asked to clear out the moment the final round ended, despite the official tournament regulations clearly listing our departure date as the following day.

And then there's the detail that, for me, drags the whole thing from mere incompetence into outright dishonesty: the flag business. Because the 2023 event was fused with the Catalan national championship, the two fields were mixed together, and one of the players qualified for the national title was, according to FIDE, registered under the flag of Argentina. Argentina, needless to say, is not an MCA federation. Now, I have zero problem with that kind of exception; every federation has its own constraints, and a sensible organizer simply accommodates them. What I cannot tolerate is what they actually did: on the official tournament record (go and check chess-results for yourself), they handed him a fake flag. Sit with that for a second. Imagine playing your games with no idea whether you've just secured a norm, because the organizer has been quietly fiddling with the federation flags of the players in the field. That isn't sloppiness. That is exactly the kind of cheating we are dealing with.

But here is the real crime, the moment they smothered the comeback. Back in round 9 of that very event, the Catalan Federation proudly announced they would organize the 2024 edition. Wonderful news! The reality? They sat on that promise until September 2024, when, at the MCA meeting held during the Olympiad, they reportedly turned up to ask, in effect, "so, we're hosting 2024… now, how do we start?" With, of course, nowhere near enough time left to put together an international event of that scale.

You can see the pattern. Fortunately for the rest of us, they are not a FIDE-recognized federation, because frankly, after watching them operate, I'd be more than a little scared if they ever held real power.

5. The Phoenix Relights: Budva 2026

So the 2024 edition, as we just saw, didn't die quietly. It died in a committee meeting, strangled by the very federation that had promised to host it. 2025 then came and went with nothing at all. For the second time in its life, the Mediterranean Championship had flatlined.

And, say it with me now, for the second time, the same nation strikes the match.

This July, the Montenegro Chess Federation hosts the 14th Mediterranean Chess Championship in Budva, from 4 to 11 July 2026, again under the patronage of the MCA, with the support of the Montenegrin Ministry of Sport and the Municipality of Budva. The numbers tell you they are serious about it this time: a total prize pool of €39,000, nearly four times the fund of that 2021 revival, spread across Open and Women's sections and various rating and age categories. It is open to players from all countries, champions crowned as Mediterranean Champions 2026.

Think about the symmetry for a second. Montenegro didn't just resurrect this championship once, after COVID, when everyone else had given up. They have now done it twice: same federation, same Adriatic coastline, same stubborn instinct to refuse to let a good idea die. If the Mediterranean Championship is a phoenix, Montenegro is the one who keeps relighting the fire.

Twenty-three years, fourteen editions, and a survival record that reads like a hospital chart: long flatlines, dramatic revivals, and one small Adriatic federation that keeps showing up with the defibrillator.

The real question for Budva 2026 isn't who wins, although with a €39,000 fund, the field should be strong enough to make that interesting. The real question is whether this revival finally sticks: whether the Mediterranean Championship can break its die-and-rise cycle and become the steady annual fixture it was always meant to be, rather than a phoenix we only see once every few years.

I, for one, hope it sticks this time. Budva is Montenegro's second act of defiance against a championship that keeps trying to die on them, and the least the chess world can do is turn up and make it worth their while. I won't be at the board for this one, but I'll be following every round, rooting for the phoenix to finally stay airborne.

Long live the phoenix.