Honourable Mayor of Nagykanizsa,

President of the Hungarian Chess Federation,

Leadership and members of the Tuxera Aquaprofit Nagykanizsa Chess Club,

Distinguished Grandmasters, Masters and players,

Arbiters, organisers, sponsors and coaches,

Ladies and gentlemen,

It is a privilege to be present for the closing of the Kanizsa Open 2026 with you, and a particular privilege in this year. The Nagykanizsa Chess Club turns one hundred. Eighteen national championships, seventeen of them in unbroken succession. Few clubs in Europe can match it. You have marked the centenary in the only way that truly honours it: by inviting the world to play. Three hundred and fifty players. Forty one countries. Nine days of serious chess.

Among those forty one flags, permit me a word about one. India has sent the second largest contingent to this championship, more than eighty players, exceeded only by the host nation itself. Some are established grandmasters; many are teenagers on their first European summer, facing Hungarian, Ukrainian, Chinese and Kazakh opponents. What they learned here in nine days, no classroom could have taught them. I thank Nagykanizsa for receiving them so warmly.

In one sense those players travelled far. In another, the game came to them. Chess was born in India as chaturanga, the game of four limbs: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots, on sixty-four squares, in the age of the Guptas. It moved west to Persia as Chatrang, then to the Arab world as Shatranj.

In September 2024, in Budapest, India won gold in both the Open and the Women's sections of the Chess Olympiad for the first time in its history. That double was won on Hungarian soil, and we have not forgotten it.

None of this happened by chance. Under the visionary leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Government of India has placed sport at the centre of national ambition. Khelo India seeks out talent in district schools and small towns rather than waiting for it to arrive. The Target Olympic Podium Scheme carries it onward. When India hosted the Chess Olympiad in Chennai in 2022, the Prime Minister launched the first Olympiad Torch Relay in the history of the game, from the land where it began.

In January, in New Delhi, India and the European Union concluded the largest trade agreement either side has ever negotiated: two billion people, a quarter of the world economy, bilateral trade already above one hundred and eighty billion euros a year. Hungary and India are already partners in the sectors that will shape the coming decade: automotive and advanced manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, water technology, and now artificial intelligence hardware, with Hungarian plants supplying servers to India's data centres in sharply rising volumes. As India and Europe move into genuinely strategic partnership, Hungarian enterprise stands to gain.

To the Tuxera Aquaprofit Nagykanizsa Chess Club and its organising team, to the Hungarian Chess Federation, to the Municipality, to the sponsors, and to the arbiters, whose work is noticed only when it falls short and who this week have been faultless: thank you. I congratulate Pranesh and the other winners of the tournament. To every player leaving without a prize: chess has a long memory, and repays the years you give it.

Köszönöm szépen. Thank you.