A paper by Georgi Markov from Sofia, with the title "A note on chess in 19th century Turkestan", has appeared in Volume 11 of Journal of Board Game Studies, downloadable from

    https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/bgs

without charge. I am not competent to comment on it in detail, but I think I should acknowledge that it reports two errors in the "Persian Chess" entries in the Classified Encyclopedia (pages 244 and 245).

The paper describes two games: the "Bukharan game", which is a variant of shatranj, and the "Persian game with a Queen". This is most conveniently described with reference to modern chess, from which it has the following differences (data on some points are lacking):

- obligatory opening moves d2-d4, d7-d5, otherwise no pawn-two;
- no castling, but king can make one leap as a knight.

The paper includes two recorded games by native players, which indicate that the game was sufficiently well established to have produced players of good quality.

The English text is of native speaker standard.