St. Teresa of Avila, Patron Saint of Chess
In 2025 World Chess formally introduced St. Teresa of Avila as the patron saint of chess. The connection was there all along: in 1566, in The Way of Perfection, Teresa used chess as her central allegory for the soul’s journey to God — the Queen that can take on the whole opposing force, the King the entire game is played for. No one in five centuries had written about chess and faith with that precision, and no one had bothered to celebrate it.
World Chess consulted with the Catholic Church to recognise the bond and announced it in London on March 11, 2025. Kommersant covered it under the headline that you can never have too many patrons.
To mark it, we produced an official icon series: limited first-edition prints, ten per edition, six colour editions across New York, London and Paris, drawing on Spanish and Mexican folk-saint imagery and setting Teresa against the skylines of chess’s great cities. A set of “chess commandments” and a collector’s chess set followed.
