Five stones

This story could be recounted chronologically, beginning at the beginning and ending it at the end, but also in the order as its details gradually emerged through the comments of the past few days. The first way would highlight how many things can be found on the internet, but of course also how many not, wherefore the story could be recounted only with huge leaks. The second would stress how many people can be found on the internet who can be reached via some sites and whose impressive knowledge reveals such connections which one would have never thought about. Now I choose the second way.


The tango La Payanca was the first composition by Augusto Berto (1889-1953) – “el Oso”, “the Bear”, perhaps the first really great accordionist of Argentine tango – not long after he started his career in San Martín, near the outskirts of Buenos Aires, in the bar called “La milonga de don Juan y doña Virginia”. “I improvised it in one night when the dancers had already exhausted all our repertoire. After seventy or eighty pieces played in a row I had to improvise.”



La Payanca. Augusto Berto

Although the melody immediately became popular, for a long time it had even no title. As late as in 1917 Berto only wrote on the first published score: “Tango milonga on folk motifs”. The title Payanca was allegedly recommended by a friend. Its justification was attempted only much later in the two texts written to it by Juan Andrés Caruso (1890-1941, the famous poet of lyrics for Francisco Canaro and Carlos Gardel) and later by Jesús Fernández Blanco (1982-1963), respectively.

Graciella Bello: Lluvia, romance y tangos, 2005, with the photo of Carlos Gardel on the wall

La Payanca. Francisco Canaro

¡Ay!, una payanca yo quiero arrojar para enlazar tu corazón ¡Qué vachaché! ¡Qué vachaché! Esa payanca será certera y ha de aprisonar todo tu amor ¡Qué vachaché! ¡Qué vachaché! Porque yo quiero tener todo entero tu querer. Mira que mi cariño es un tesoro. Mira que mi cariño es un tesoro. Y que pior que un niño po’ ella “yoro”… Y que pior que un niño po’ ella “yoro”… Payanca de mi vida, ay, yo te imploro. Payanca de mi vida, ay, yo te imploro, que enlaces para siempre a la que adoro… que enlaces para siempre a la que adoro…

Oh! I would like to throw a payanca to reach with it your heart. What will you do? What will you do? This payanca is a certain one that will take captive all your love. What will you do? What will you do? Because I want you to love only me. Look, my love is a real treasure Look, my love is a real treasure and I cry for your love worse than a child and I cry for your love worse than a child Payanca of my life, oh, I beg you Payanca of my life, oh, I beg you to take captive forever her whom I love to take captive forever her whom I love…

La Payanca. Roberto Firpo

Con mi payanca de amor, siempre mimao por la mujer, pude enlazar su corazón… ¡Su corazón! Mil bocas como una flor de juventud, supe besar, hasta saciar mi sed de amor… ¡Mi sed de amor! Ninguna pudo escuchar los trinos de mi canción, sin ofrecerse a brindar sus besos por mi pasión… ¡Ay, quién pudiera volver a ser mocito y cantar, y en brazos de la mujer la vida feliz pasar! Payanca, payanquita de mis amores, mi vida la llenaste de resplandores… ¡Payanca, payanquita ya te he perdido y sólo tu recuerdo fiel me ha seguido! Con mi payanca logré a la mujer que me gustó, y del rival siempre triunfé. ¡Siempre triunfé! El fuego del corazón en mi cantar supe poner, por eso fui rey del amor… ¡Rey del amor!

With my payanca of love I was always pampered by women, I could take captive their hearts. Their hearts! A thousand mouths, a thousand flowers of youth I could kiss to quench my thirst of love. My thirst of love! None could listen to the trills of my song without offering her kisses to my passion. Oh, who can return to be young again, to sing and to pass life happily in the arms of women! Payanca, payanquita, payanca of my love, you have filled my life with brilliance. Payanca, payanquita, I have long lost you and only your memory has followed me faithfully. With my payanca I could reach any woman that I liked, and I always triumphed over my rival! Always triumphed! I could fill my song with the fire of the heart this is how I became the king of love. The king of love!

Cristina Bergoglio (Buenos Aires): The last tango

La Payanca. Hector Varela

Medardo Pantoja, Quechua painter of Tilcara (1906-): Payana players

The payanca, which in the text figures in the meaning of “lasso throwing” or perhaps even “stone throwing”, was also a popular children’s game in Argentina throughout the 20th century, also known as payana, tinenti or even dinenti. Its essence is that the players have to toss up in the air one of the five stones laying on the earth, and to pick up the others one by one until it falls back, plus to grasp that one, too. Then they have to pick them up two by two, then three together plus one. Once they succesfully did it, there comes the tanteo, the “extra”, with a variety of tasks: for example, they also have to toss up the stones laying on the earth, or throw all five in the air and grasp them all.


A few days ago, after the publication of the photos of fin-de-siècle children’s games Москва, researching the history of La Payanca, inquired us whether we also had archive photos on this game, and we sadly had to admit that we did not. Nevertheless Araz soon realized that the rules of the game are the same as those of beşdaş, that is, “five stones”, played in Azerbaijan. In the 1980s he was surprised to see that in Uzbekistan this was a girls’ game, and he has since learned that it is widely played throughout Eastern Anatolia as beş taş. He has also included this video where Turkish girls play it very skillfully:



In the meantime Москва also investigated further, and found that the game is also played in Serbia, and that its English equivalent is jackstones or knucklebones, as it has been played since antiquity all over the Mediterranean with the knucklebones of sheep or goats. In Greek it is called ἀστράγαλοι and in Latin tali, meaning the same. Moreover, a video was also found where a Korean player documents his skills:



A propos of ἀστράγαλοι Araz also added that the Turkish for knucklebone is aşık, and this – ашик – is the name of the game in Bulgaria as well. On 9th and 10th-century Azerbaijani archaeological sites lots of such bones, once used for game, were found. Moreover, an Israeli friend of him also reported that “five stones” was a popular game in his childhood as well.

At this point entered the research Language Hat, who confirmed that the game, known as “gonggi”, is really widespread in Korea among girls, so that each province has a particular name and rules for it. And he also quoted from Elizabeth Yoel Campbell’s Yesterday’s Children: Growing Up Assyrian in Persia attesting that in the 1920s it was still played under the Azeri name besh dash by Assyrian children in the Northern Persian town of Maragha.

The blog of Language Hat is like a first-class international language research institute and an elite London club in one, where the host every morning raises something interesting in a few line – what a science it is, to raise something in a way it appears interesting! – and the visitors from all over the world add their completitions. By the end of the day usually a solution is outlined which is always much more exciting than you would have thought at the beginning.

This knowledgeable readers’ circle now also immediately mapped on the basis of their readings or personal experiences where the game is played in the world and where not. It is played from Nepal throughout the Indian subcontinent to Malaysia and Singapore, and from Central Asia through Anatolia and the Latin Mediterranean to South America on the one hand and to the Netherlands on the other, the latter two being most probably the result of Spanish influence. However, we have found no example either from Arabic lands or from Europe outside the Mediterranean sphere. On this basis some people suggested the possibility that maybe the game was spread over the Silk Road. It is also very interesting that in most places it has been explicitly a girls’ game.

I have placed on the following map the various suggestions and data, provided with their sources. Red dots indicate the “five stone” game (either with stones or with knucklebones) and blue dots the use of knucklebones for any game.





Although we also found some descriptions of the game on the Persian net – here, here, or here –, nevertheless they all described its version known in the Iranian Azerbaijan, even providing its original name: باش داش “besh dash”. There was only one site reporting about the game outside of Azerbaijan province, but it turned out to be written in the Golestani city of Gomishan, whose very name, coming from Turkic “kümüsh”, ‘silver’ shows that it lays in the Turkmen region of Northern Iran, so it is no wonder that the game is also called “besh dash” here, and its version played with three stones “üch dash”, ‘three stones’.

Turkmen girls playing bash dash in Gomishan and featuring on a school ceremony

However, to our great surprise, a Hungarian data was also found. In the article “Women’s works in Zoboralja” by Zsuzsanna Tátrai in the 1995 issue of Néprajzi Látóhatár (Horizons of Ethnography) a female informer born in 1911 speaks about the games they played as little goose-girls in the 1920s on this very archaic Hungarian language island to the north of Nitra:

“We played with little stones. With five stones we did all kinds of games. We picked smooth stones. You had to toss it up and in the meantime pick up others, to be so skillfull to pick up and also to grasp that one when falling back. First you picked up one, then two at once, then three, and then one again. You had to be skillfull. If the stone fell, you lost, and it was the other’s turn.”

Gooseherd in the puszta of Ecseg, 1907. Photo by István Györffy

After the publication of this post our reader Tamás Braun announced in a comment that he also knew this game and played it with pebbles in Budapest in the 50s, at the age of 8-10, and it was called “bikázás” (bull-fight). On the basis of the name I found it in other texts as well. Renowned contemporary authors Péter Lengyel and Endre Merényi refer to it a couple of times in their childhood remembrances Búcsú két szólamban (Farewell in two voices), and a short story in the famous literary journal Nyugat (West) mentions it in 1928 as a favorite pastime of unemployed workers, but neither describes it, as if it were something generally known. Moreover, it is also mentioned in the scenario (2005) made of Nobel laureate Imre Kertész’s Fateless. However, the director here felt that it must be explained, even if this discredits the figure of the Budapest tough guy in 1944: how is it that he does not know?

“– I’ve got a couple of pebbles: who feels like playing “bull-fight”? – shouts the Gigolo.
– How do you play it? – Moshkovich asks.
– ’Tis simple as a piece of cake – the Gigolo explains. – You put down a handful – he also shows what he says –, then you toss up one, and whoever grabs the most from the earth until it falls back…”

Boys playing at the Danube in Budapest, 1963. Photo by Endre Friedmann

Then, following the thread of the synonyms it also turned out to have been called “kapókövezés” (pebble-grabbing), and to have been played all over the country. The Hungarian Ethnographic Lexicon has a separate entry on it, but it is also described in detail by Áron Kiss’s classical Magyar gyermekjáték-gyűjtemény (Collection of Hungarian children’s games, 1891). And the Gyermekjátékok (Children’s Games, 1980) by Hintalan-Lázár even provides a short verse chanted by the inactive players:

Babona, babona, vaskereszt, Ha elejted, az se lesz.

Magic, magic, iron cross, let it fall and you will lose.

“Pebble-grabbing” played by girls in early 20th-century Transylvania (Szék or Szolnok-Doboka county)

Москва also discovered a 19th-century quotation, which shows that the game of “камушки” – “pebbles” – was very popular among girls in Southern Russian Tula. The game is mixed with Orthodox religious metaphors, and the text also has a number of “magic formulas” the girls whispered during the game in order to bend the victory towards themselves. The blog author also adds at the end that the game is still popular in the same region.

Andrei Karelin (1837-1906): Two peasant family from the Tula government

And Minus273 found two descriptions at the other end of the Silk Road, on the Chinese net, here and here, where the game is called 抓石子 zhuā shízǐr, “pebble-grabbing”. He translated it like this:

“I recall that, what we boys loved the most to play as children is pebble-grasping. Five same-sized pebbles are knocked out from a stone. (The size must befit the size of your hands) To play the game, you drop the five pebbles with one hand, take a pebble, to toss up to the sky. Within the interval before the pebble falls, you need to grasp the pebbles on the ground, and catch the falling pebble. Failure to catch it, or failure to grasp the pebbles on the ground means loss. You get a/some score with the successful grasping. When the scores are enough, it’s time for pass-crossing. The pass-crossing consists of making the thumb and index finger of the (left) hand touch the ground. While you toss the pebble up, you send the pebbles on the ground across the downside of your left hand, with your right hand. Whoever has sent all the pebbles across successfully crosses the pass. The one who crosses the largest number of passes wins.”

“Usually it’s a couple of girls playing together…”

However, on the illustration of the Chinese description we see no pebbles but the same knucklebones, the Turkish aşıks which, under the name of ἀστράγαλος and talus, were also used for playing in the ancient Mediterranean, and which most probably had been brought to China from the Central Asian nomadic tribes just as the Greek tradition considered them of Asian origin.




Araz also sent some good links on the importance of aşık in modern Central Asia. The above photos were used to illustrate the game of ашики in the series on “Forgotten plays” of the web portal of Ferghana province in Usbekistan. And the following two photos show the peak of the career of aşık, also called альчики in Russian: in Kazakstan, in the town of Atyrau even two monuments were raised to it, moreover in a scientific-educational context, apparently in evocation of good luck, which seems to show that among the two main uses of aşık, here the game of chance is preferred to beş taş.



In ancient Greece, aşık or ἀστράγαλος was definitely regarded as a foreign game. But while Plato derived it together with every other kind of wisdom from Egypt, Herodotus, who was more versed in the Persian empire, emphasized its Anatolian origins.

The sons of the king of Carcemish (North Mesopotamia, Anatolia) play with sheep bones. 9th c. BC See more here.

A girl playing with ἀστράγαλοι/tali. Roman statue, ca. 130-150 AD. Berlin, Antikenmuseum

From Classical literature we have a detailed knowledge on the use of these knucklebones, which was twofold, just as that of aşık. On the one hand, they were used similar to dice, attributing four different values to the four flat sides: 1, 3, 4, 6. The rules of the game are presented in details on the site of Roman antiquities by Wladyslaw Jan Kowalski, and we can read about them in a very entertaining way in the dialogue entirely dedicated by Erasmus to this game. The actors of the dialogue are the shepherd boy Ganymedes, kidnapped and brought to heaven by Zeus, who in his heavenly boredom tries to teach the rules of the game to little Eros. And moreover on this page we even find a modern statistical analysis on how likely the knucklebone falls on the one or the other side.

Greek bone astragalus, 500-300 BC, from here

Greek lead astragalus, 500-300 BC, from here

Greek bronze astragalus, 600-100 BC, from here

The so-called Sotades astragalus, a vase in the form of astragalus from Greece, ca. 460 BC. British Museum

The astragalus as a magic object bringing good luck also featured on several coins.

Two Roman aes grave uncia, ca. 230-226 BC from here

A coin from an unknown Anatolian city, 4th c. BC, from here

Siculo-Punic silver tetradrachma, 300-289 BC, with an astragalus in front of the horse head, from here

Campania (Neapolis), didrachma, 320-300 BC, with an astragalus behind Nike’s head, from here

Corinth, silver stater, 345-307 BC, with an astragalus behind Athene’s head, from here

However, there was also another version of knucklebone games, called “pentelitha”, that is “five stones” in ancient sources. There is no surviving description on its rules. But it seems that it was primarily played by girls, and as their gestures attest, they played it in the same way as all the other girls in the past two and a half thousand years from Singapore through China to the Mediterranean and South America.

Girls playing with astragalus. Hellenistic Greek terracotta group. Capua or Apulia, 330-300 BC. British Museum

Girls playing with astragalus. Terracotta pyxis from Attica, with an astragalus as a handle of the cover, 425-400 BC. New York Metropolitan Museum

The survival of this game in the Mediterranean are attested by such representations as the following painting from 1734 by Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) in the Museum of Baltimore, where a girl is playing or practising a game very similar to beş daş with four traditional knucklebones and a throwing ball. Or by Pieter Brueghel’s Children’s Games, often quoted here at Río Wang, in whose lower left corner two little girls are completely absorbed in playing beş daş – with astragaloi! And it is also attested by Wang Wei, according to whom in his childhood, in the 60s the game was played all over Mallorca by the girls, and although it was called “cinquetes” or “pedretes”, nevertheless it was played in the ancient way, with knucklebones, which were not difficult to obtaion in the then largely rural Mallorca. His sister had a whole collection of the most handy knucklebones, and as she usually keeps everything, he hopes these were not thrown away either. If she still has them, and he manages to take a photo, we will also publish it together with the magic formulas which, similarly to the Russian girls, were whispered by Mallorcan girls during the game, if she still remembers them.



And the game has of course survived in Greece too, where today it is known as πεντόβολο or πεντόβολα, that is “five obulus” and its rules are identical to how it is played in the other places. Its name also figures on the page dedicated to “forgotten Greek children’s games”, where a beautiful video presents with archive photos a great part of these games (unfortunately not including the pentovolo):



And just as at the Western end of Mediterranean culture the payana, so at its Eastern end the pentovolo also inspired a song, whose text was written by none less than the Nobel laureate poet Odysseas Elytis. The children’s song is part of the cycle The Sovereign Sun, whose initial piece, The Song of the Sun was already quoted by us twice in two posts dedicated to the eulogy of the Mediterranean. Its music was written by Dimitris Lagios, and it is sung by Eleni Vitali in 1982.


Odysseas Elytis: Ο Ήλιος ο Ηλιάτορας (The Sovereign Sun). Music by Dimitris Lagios, sung by Eleni Vitali (1982). 6. The song of the little girl

Δύο συ και τρία γω πράσινο πεντόβολο μπαίνω μέσα στον μπαξέ γεια σου κύριε μενεξέ. Σιντριβάνι και νερό και χαμένο μου όνειρο. Τζίντζιρας τζιντζίρισε το ροδάνι γύρισε. Χοπ αν κάνω δεξιά πέφτω πάνω στη ροδιά. Χοπ αν κάνω αριστερά πάνω στη βατομουριά. Το 'να χέρι μου κρατεί μέλισσα θεόρατη τ' άλλο στον αέρα πιάνει πεταλούδα που δαγκάνει

two for you and three for me green pentovolo I enter the garden hello mister hyacinth fountain and water and my lost dreams a cicada is chirring the wheel of the well cranking if I hop to the right I fall on the pomegranate if I hop to the left I fall on the blackberry in the one hand I’m holding a huge bee if I stretch the other I catch a butterfly