Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine
* 31 October 1892 Moscow † 24 March 1946 Estoril, Portugal
Buried in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris (Lev Polugaevsky was buried here as well).
The grave was heavily damaged by a severe storm on 26/12/1999 and has been restored later on.
Photograph by Michael Negele (in November 1990):
We received the following photographs and detailed information from our French member Alain Biénabe (Bordeaux).
Photos © Denis Teyssou (2004/7).
Alekhine was buried in Lisbon on April 16, 1946.
In 1956, his ashes were transferred to the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris (Section 8).
This tomb was erected on March 25, 1956 by FIDE President Folke Rogard (Sweden), Vyacheslav Ragosin (USSR), Marcel Berman Vice President (France), World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik (USSR), Gian Carlo dal Verme (Italy) and Pierre Dierman (Belgium).
His tomb, where his name is engraved in Cyrillic and Roman, shows a chessboard:
The inscription reads (translated):
Alexander Alekhine
Chess genius of Russia and France
1st November 1892 - 25 March 1946
World chess champion from 1927 to 1935 and from 1937 to his death
Grace Alekhine née Wishar (1876-1956)
The tomb is surmounted by a bas-relief of Alekhine at chess (sculpture by A. Baratz):
Destroyed in 1999/12 (after a storm and a tree falling on the grave), it was rebuilt exactly and with the same materials.
It was completed in early 2003, with support and funding of the Cultural Service of the Russian Embassy (they paid the bill on their own: more than 20 000 euros).
Our Italian member Santo Daniele Spina has sent us his article La tomba di Alekhine, published in L’Italia Scacchistica no. 1205, December 2008, p. 489:
A PDF of the article with two additional pictures:
Una foto originale della tomba di Alekhine