Vjollca Veli, women's champion of Albania

[JustinHorton]

One of the most acclaimed books of the last year or so has been Lea Ypi's Free, a memoir of her childhood in Albania in the last few years of the Hoxha regime (and in the first few years after its fall).

In her third chapter, she writes of her mother, Vjollca Veli*:

At twenty-two, she became the national chess champion, and defended the title for a few years.

I've not been able to find any trace of Vjollca Veli's chess at all. No Chessgames entry, no useful Google results by searching her name in connection with chess or even shehu. Albania don't seem to have fielded a women's team in Olympiads (nor would she have been allowed to travel if they had, for reasons the book eventually makes clear) and she is not listed on Wikipedia under Chess in Albania.

Nor, intriguingly, does she seem to appear in a list of Albanian chess champions - but the list, for women, only goes back to 1977. While I don't know her mother's age, Ypi herself was born in 1979, and it's presumably quite possible that the events concerned could have been some years before her birth.

So what, if anything is known about Vjollca Veli and her chess? When did she win her national championships?

[* the reviewer here writes that she "went by Doli", which I missed in the book and which may complicate things.]

[Matt Mackenzie]

Wikipedia seems to indicate the separate women's events *started* in 1977. Though that may not be accurate, and tbh one does find it slightly hard to believe - there must have been *some* female players around in the country before then.

[Pete Morriss]

[* the reviewer here writes that she "went by Doli", which I missed in the book and which may complicate things.]

Lea Ypi mentions on p. 36 that 'Doli' was her mother's nickname (meaning 'doll') so it is unlikely to be the name under which she played chess. I got the impression when reading the book that her mother would have been 22 in the late sixties (though I can't now find why I thought that); Ypi mentions (p. 38) that when she was a child her mother was a chess trainer, and had presumably stopped playing.

[Chris Goodall]

There seems to be an author who goes by Doli Veli Ypi. But there are only 5 Google results for Doli Veli prior to October 2021 when the book came out, and 6 for Vjollca Veli. (You can hit the "All time" date dropdown and set it to Custom range.)