Best Latvian chess pieces reproduction?
Sort:
@Bombur19, You pays your money and you makes your choice. All of the sellers you mention make excellent product, And I’ve bought from all of them. But the Latvian/Moldovan set is special for me. I have two excellent originals, as well as one repro. The weight is unnecessary.
Check Grau explained to me: Very nicely done. But it’s mistaken to call it “Latvian.” When Russian collectors hear people refer to sets like this as “Latvian” they scratch their heads because they have little or nothing to do with Latvia. The style was popularized by sets made in Mordovian gulags, leading many of us to call sets in this style “Mordovian.” Some Russian collectors call them the “Ob`edovskie” chess pieces after the factory near Moscow that made them. https://sovietchesssets.com/2024/02/19/urban-legend-and-the-not-very-latvian-set/
There is a second confusion here, where Mordovia is a republic east of Moscow, and Moldova is a small country between Romania and Ukraine which was historically known as Moldavia.
Check Grau showed me this link to a very interesting blog: https://retrorussia.com/chess-chessmen/soviet-chess-the-trend-of-changing-the-shape-of-chess-figures-in-one-example/?fbclid=IwAR11lCkBhKPdbIFa9pVoxIsmN3kNlgLtDaAyq2a9ahYuNbJUrAYKtFUZJGY&fs=e&s=cl
It explains where the "Queen's Gambit pieces come from".
For those of you with 3D printers I offer STL files to make Latvian (or Mordovian!) style pieces on my webstore. You can buy them here: http://www.3dprintedchess.com/buy-stls/
Here are some examples printed in wood filament and resin:
