In English, the board game is called Go. In Chinese it is weiqi. The short English name came through Japanese. The game itself started in China.
A growing number of Turkish university students now sit down to that same board. "There has been a significant rise in interest recently," Eren Kurter, president of the Turkish Go Association, told Xinhua in August 2025. Go is becoming more common on campuses, he said, as Chinese films, music, and now this old game travel farther in Turkey.
Yigitcan Cortuk, a graduate student, has played for five years. The more he played, the more he wanted of the culture around the stones. He later chose to study in China. "It's not just a game," he said. "It introduced me to a whole new world of meaning."
Cagatay Tavsanoglu, a biology professor at Hacettepe University in Ankara and a longtime player, put the draw another way. Through Go, he said, students from a Western-style classroom get a window on Chinese thought: patience, strategy, and looking inward. "It opens a new window for us."
That window got a larger room this summer. From July 25 to August 2, 2026, Hacettepe University hosted the European Go Congress, the first time the gathering had been held in Turkey. A year earlier, Kurter said the campus event was expected to bring about 1,500 players from Europe and China, including professionals from China.
Turkey is now among the top five European countries by number of active Go players, according to the 2025 report. The students did not have to learn a new Chinese name to join a club. They met the game as Go. On the board, it was still weiqi: a Chinese game that took a Japanese word to the rest of the world, and then found a new crowd in Ankara.