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Festive cheer is upon us, and some of it is even permeating this blog. But what does Christmas have to do with cartography? Well, there is Christmas Island – three of them, in fact, one of which was discussed here about a year ago (#228). And then there is this Christmas card, made and sent in by Russell Piekarski. It uses a collage of several countries and a few US states to create an image of Santa, his reindeer and sleigh (full of presents), some Christmas stockings and of course a fully trimmed Christmas tree. I will leave it to you, dear reader, to list all the countries and states used to create this image.

Another cartographic approach to Christmas is shown on this second map, sent in by Marc Eno, laying out the probability of a white Christmas for the US’s Lower 48 states. Remarkably, the southern area where snowfall by the 25th of December historically is least likely, is almost perfectly demarcated by the so-called Missouri Compromise Line, the parallel running at 36°30′ north (and forming the border between North Carolina and Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, Missouri and Arkansas, also running close by the border between Oklahoma and Kansas, New Mexico and Colorado, and Arizona and Utah). South of that line, chances of a white Christmas are mostly below 5%, with a few 5-10% patches thrown in. Only the Rocky Mountain range in New Mexico significantly break this pattern. Those Rockies further north are practically the only areas outside of northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Maine with over 90% likelihood of Christmas snow.

Finally, this Holiday Thematic Toponym Map, devised and sent in by Douglas Caldwell, lists some of Santa’s Favorite Places, as found in the Geographic Names Information System, that lists over 2 million toponyms in the US and its dependencies.

Almost all of Santa’s reindeer are represented on the US map. Dasher in Georgia, Donner in Florida (others in Louisiana and Canada), Comet in Missouri (and half a dozen other states), Vixen in Louisiana, Dancer Branch in Tennessee, Mount Blitzen in Nevada (there’s a Donner und Blitzen River in Oregon, which has the only other eight Blitzen-related place-names in the US), Cupid Lake in Minnesota, and – even though he is extracanonical – Rudolph in South Dakota (and four other states). The odd one out is Prancer, whose name apparently is yet to be attached to a place in America;
There is, however, a generic Reindeer Cove, Maine (there’s actually also one in Alaska, near Nome);and a Sleigh Canyon, in Utah;
There is a Stocking Hill in upstate New York;
Besides Elf, North Carolina there is also, less cheerfully, an Elf Cemetery in Pennsylvania;
Santa Claus, Arizona is a former tourist attraction (and currently a ghost town); two other Santa Clauses are located in Indiana (the world’s only Santa Claus with a post office) and Georgia.
Colorado has a Yule Creek;
Chimney Mountain in Oklahoma is one of eight throughout the country, and North Pole in Idaho is one of a handful sprinkled across the country (also, no wonder, in Alaska).

Many thanks to Mr Piekarski for the appropriate card, to Mr Eno for the White Christmas Prediction map (taken here from the National Weather Forecast office in St Louis, Missouri), and to Mr Caldwell for producing this map of Santa’s Special Places. And mappy holidays to you all!

Crossing the bridge over the Saint John River from Clair (New Brunswick) into Fort Kent (Maine), you arrive at the northern terminus of US Route 1. Its number reflects the fact that it is the easternmost of the north-south highways that were standardised in the mid-1920s (1). It is not the longest (2), although its southern terminus is at a stone’s throw from Havana, under the palm trees of Key West, a world away from the snows of Canada. Neither is it the most famous – that laurel goes to Route 66, connecting Chicago to Los Angeles.
But if US Route 66 is the Mother Road, then US Route 1 is America’s Main Street. US 1 runs through Boston, New York and Washington DC, a few blocks from the White House. It skirts battlefields from the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Large parts of it consist of shopping centres, strip malls and other sprawl, but it also runs through swamps, wilderness and forests. One of US 1’s longest rural stretches is in northern Maine, where it hugs the Canadian border east to Van Buren and then south to Eastport, before turning west to follow the coast until crossing over into New Hampshire.
Where the sparse, rolling landscape of northern Maine can get a bit monotonous, some relief is provided by the Maine Solar System Model (MSSM). The MSSM, constructed in 2000 by the University of Maine at Presque Isle (UMPI), is the fourth-largest solar system model in the world. It is centred at UMPI’s Folsom Hall, which houses the Northern Maine Museum of Science. The scale is 1 to 93 million, which means that one Astronomical Unit (AU) equals one mile (1.6 km). All of our system’s planets are located along US Route 1, in order to present drivers with the opportunity to get a feeling of the scale of our solar system. Its original length was about 40 miles (64 km), all the way to Pluto, at the Tourist Information Centre in Houlton.

The Sun is located in Folsom Hall, has a diameter of 49′ 6″ (15 m) and is represented by yellow-coloured beams and wall markings.
Mercury (diameter: 2.1 inches, or 5.3 cm) is located in Burelle’s Garden at UMPI, 0.4 miles (640 metres) from the Sun.
Venus (5.2 inches, 13.2 cm) is at the Budget Traveler Motor Inn, 0.7 miles (1.2 km) south of the Sun.
The Earth (5.5 inches, 14 cm) is near Percy’s Auto Sales, 1 mile (1.6 km) from the Sun. A separate Moon (1.5 inch or 3.8 cm) is placed 16 feet (4.9 m) from the Earth’s axis.
Mars (2.9 inches, 7.4 cm) is right next to the Welcome to Presque Isle sign, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from the Sun.
While it’s not difficult to miss the smaller rocky planets, the gas giants are easy to spot from the road. Jupiter has a diameter of 61.4 inches (1.52 m), and is located 5.3 miles (8.5 km) from the Sun. Its four moons are also represented: Io (1.6 inches, 10.2 cm), at 15 feet (4.6 m) from Jupiter’s axis; Europa (diameter 1.3 inches or 3.3 cm; distance 24 feet or 7.32 m); Ganymede (diameter 2.3 inches, 5.8 cm; distance 38 feet, 11.6 m); and Callisto (diameter 2.1 inches, 5.3 cm; distance 67 feet, 20.4 m).
Just outside of the settlement of Mars Hill, and with its own visitor bench, is the spectacular model of Saturn, with a diameter of 51.9 inches (132 cm) and surrounded by a ring structure with an outer diameter of 117 inches (297 cm). Saturn is 9.7 miles (15.6 km) away from the Sun.
Uranus is just outside of Bridgewater Town Hall, with a diameter of 22 inches (56 cm) at a distance of 19.5 miles (31.4 km) from the Sun.
Neptune (21.3 inches, 54 cm) is in a field near Littleton, 30.6 miles (49.2 km) from the Sun.
Pluto is a tiny single inch large (2.54 cm), accompanied by its even tinier moon Charon (0.5 inch or 1.8 cm, at 8.5 inches or 21.6 cm from Pluto’s axis), both placed at the Houlton Information Centre.

Pluto has, of course, ceased to be a member of the planetary club. At a meeting in 2006, the International Astronomical Union decided to downgrade its status. It is no longer the smallest of the ‘regular’ planets, but the second-largest of the dwarf planets. The reclassification was necessary to avoid swelling the ranks of ‘regular’ planets with continuously discovered objects in the Kuiper belt, beyond Pluto.
Case in point is Eris, discovered in 2005, and 27% more massive than Pluto. Rather than elevating it to the status of planet, the choice was made to place it and Pluto together in a new category of dwarf planets. With its moon Dysnomia, Eris, at 96.7 AU from the Sun, is the most distant natural object in the solar system.
Rather than remove Pluto from the MSSM, the people at UMPI have chosen a more inclusive approach to the changed circumstances. Pluto stayed, and Eris was added, 54.5 miles south of Pluto, near Topsfield. The MSSM’s job is to place these distances in perspective, but the mind can’t help but be dazzled by the dimensions of the solar system, even if it is reduced to fit into Maine. For example: relative to the scale of the MSSM, light would travel at a speed of 7 mph (11.2 kmph). And the nearest star would still be 250,000 miles (402,336 km) away. That’s just over 100 times the entire length of US Route 1.
(1) US Highway 2, for example, runs from Houlton (Maine) to Everett (Washington).
(2) US1 is 2,377 miles (3,825 km) long; US20, from Boston (Massachusetts) to Newport (Oregon), is America’s longest road, at 3,365 miles (5,415 km).

As discussed before on this blog, electoral maps have a strange tendency to transmit more than the results of a political horse-race. They often serve as quirky memorials of ancient cultural borders, as suggested in the following cases:

France’s 2007 presidential elections (#108): the marked contiguity of areas voting Sarkozy and Royal in the first round of the 2007 presidential elections (Sego dominating in the southwest and Brittany, Sarko almost everywhere else) is a result, it has been suggested, of the southwest’s long tradition of dissent, going back to the Cathar heresy in the Middle Ages, via Huguenot protestantism somewhat later, and surviving as anticlericalism, antimonarchism and eventually modern socialism.
Ukraine’s 2004 presidential elections (#343): the pro-European western half of the country voted for Yushchenko, the pro-Russian eastern half for Yanukovich, along dividing lines suggested by some to be similar to the borders of the Kievan Rus, a medieval Slavic state at the basis of both Russia and Ukraine.
Poland’s 2007 legislative elections (#348): even though massive displacements of Poles, Germans and others peoples have totally re-drawn the ethnic and political map of this part of the world, these electoral results nevertheless seem to correspond with an old imperial border that has been erased from history since 1918.

Another set of maps now aims to demonstrate a parallel between the dialectics of party politics and the dialects of the national language in Denmark. The map on the left hand side shows the difference in use of the Dansk stød (*), a sort of glottal stop typical for Danish, and used differently by some of its main dialects. The map on the right shows the results of the recent nationwide mayoral elections (17 November 2009).

People who practise the West Jutlandish stød have elected mayors from the Venstre party and to a lesser extent from the Conservative party. Venstre, literally ‘Left’, is actually a centre-right party in the liberal tradition. West Jutland-speakers therefore generally tend to vote right-wing.
Those who speak with the standard Danish stød (i.e. kun faellesdansk stød) or without any stød at all (intet stød) tend to vote for the Social Democrats: the northeast and southeast of Jutland, Fyn (the large island off the southeast Jutland coast) and large parts of Sjælland (the biggest island, especially the Copenhagen area (the concentration of smaller circumscriptions on the island’s northeastern edge).

The concurrence between speaking and voting patterns, strongest in Jutland but a bit more muddled on the islands, is all the more puzzling considering the fact that the dialectal use of the stød is in decline since the beginning of the 20th century.
One possible explanation is that the fading dialect borders actually represent even older cultural patterns. This article in Videnskab.dk proposes that the dialect border coincides with the one between ‘hilly’ and ’sandy’ Jutland, with all the social differences that might imply. Or it could be that two different types of population coexist in Jutland as a result of massive immigration in the 1600s, following huge local mortality due to war and plague.
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‘Mange tak’ to Henning Michael Møller Just for sending in this map.
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(*) literally: ’shock’, or ‘blow’ (as while playing wind instruments, or in boxing)
 
 

 
A few miles northwest of the small town of Minden, in the seemingly endless Nebraska plains, lies a field shaped like the state itself. By intelligent design or as an accident of agriculture? 
Either option seems unlikely in a landscape so utilitarian that efficiency has imposed symmetry upon it. These plains are cut into perfect squares, with sides exactly a mile long. The straight lines dividing the squares are semi-anonymous roads, named after numbers and letters.
The only other pattern thriving in this checkered landscape is the circle, touching the edges of many squares (as seen on the left of this picture): a sign of the popular method of centre-pivot irrigation. As pretty as that might look from the sky, all these squares and circles are practical first and foremost. This is not a topology of frivolity. Why lose a bit of perfectly arable land only to sculpt something as pointless as a map?
Is Nebraska Field a coincidence, then? When not being centrally irrigated, each of the mile-by-mile blocks is often divided into smaller fields, mostly rectangular but not really symmetrical. That sort of describes the shape of Nebraska – but still, chances of a field mimicking it so perfectly seem very remote indeed.
Nebraska is rectangular in an oblong sort of way, with straight borders everywhere except in the east, where it is bounded by the Missouri River. An immediately recognisable feature on its western border is the square chunk bitten out by Wyoming, allowing that state to be completely rectangular. 
The field mimics all these shapes: the straight lines north, west and south, the indentation in the southwest, the slightly slanting eastern border, near what looks like a little, elongated lake. And all in the right proportions too.
So: coincidence or design? It has to be one or the other. But the only thing we know for sure are the circumstances of the Field’s discovery. ”It was a complete coincidence, which is the best part,” says Adam Kommel, who sent in this map. “I was just goofing off on Google Maps one day, seeing if I could find the largest all-green spot in the middle of the country. I zoomed in a bit and all of a sudden I just saw it.” 
The mysterious Nebraska Field does not seem to have achieved even local fame. The town of Minden only boasts a Pioneer Museum, and each December hyper-decorates itself to defend its reputation as Christmas City. Any extra information on the Nebraska Field and its creator/owner would therefore be greatly appreciated! 
Many thanks to Mr Kommel for finding and sending in this rather peculiar map-in-a-map.

Leo Belgicus by Petrus Kaerius (1617), copied from the original design by Michael Aitzinger. Image taken here from the website of the Sanderus map shop in Ghent.
Lions are not native to the Low Countries, but here is one particular specimen that is nevertheless very local. The Leo Belgicus is a lion transposed on a map of the area, its ferocity symbolizing the belligerence of a nation fighting for its life.
Confusingly, that nation is not, as the name would suggest, Belgium. Nor is it the Netherlands. The modern acronym Benelux more accurately describes the entity depicted by the Leo belgicus: Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
In the 16th century, that general area was also known as the Seventeen Provinces, first under Burgundian and later Spanish tutelage. As the plural description suggests, these provinces were a loose confederation with little or no unifyingly ‘national’ sentiment.
That changed when religious upheavals pitted the increasingly protestant and independent-minded locals against their staunchly catholic Spanish overlords. The old Roman toponym Belgica was used to provide the entire Low Countries with a single geographic denominator.
The Austrian cartographer baron Michael Aitzinger, probably inspired by the prevalence of lions in the coats of arms of many of the Seventeen Provinces, drew the first Leo Belgicus in 1583, fifteen years into the Eighty Years’ War of the Spanish in the Netherlands. The long war soon became a stalemate, with neither party able to achieve total victory.
At the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the de facto situation was officially recognised: seven provinces in the North had become an independent protestant republic, henceforth known to geography as Belgica foederata (the republican Netherlands), the South remained catholic and Spanish – and royal (Belgica regia). The Lion had been cut in half.
The Leo belgicus exists in several forms. The oldest one is of a lion rampant, its head in the northeast of the Low Countries and its rear taking shape in the southwest. This original position might give a clue as to just how Aitzinger might have conceived of the Leo belgicus. The mouth of the lion corresponds roughly to a remarkably rectangular shape in the Dutch border with Germany (a 20 by 20 km square bordering Coevorden).
A later version shows the Belgic Lion passant, with its head where its tail was, and vice versa. The map is oriented towards the west. The curving North Sea coast shapes the lion’s back. The lion’s less agressive pose reflects the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-1621) between the Spanish and the Dutch.
The Leo Belgicus symbolised a nation that never was – a Netherlands that also was a Belgium, and covered the territory of both now separate countries. The deepening of the intra-Netherlands split made the Leo Belgicus redundant. The curiosity lived on, though, as a Leo Hollandicus, adapted to reflect only the the province of Holland, core of the independent Dutch republic.
　

Leo Belgicus by Jodocus Hondius (1611) taken here  from this website.

　
　
(*) Roman Gallia Belgica covered the southern part of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and parts of northern France and western Germany. Its name derived from its Celtic inhabitants, the Belgae. Belgica gave rise to the French term belgique (originally also an adjective, that later became a noun) and Belgium.(**) The Netherlands and the corresponding terms in other languages (Pays-Bas, die Niederlände) refers to the current country which, curiously, in its own language speaks of itself in singular form: Nederland. The plural de Nederlanden still refers to the larger, Benelux-sized territory.

1. Asphalt Maine

Looking down upon the patched-up surface of an unnamed street, J. David Lovejoy couldn’t help noticing a remarkable example of accidental geography. The patch bears a striking resemblance to Maine, imitating its slanted, almost-straight northwestern border with Quebec, the flat-top border in the north, and straight down again along the border with New Brunswick. The Atlantic coast is less than perfect and the manhole prevents a southward jut towards Kittery on the state line with New Hampshire, but these are minor quibbles. The overall impression is clearly that of Maine. Just under a year ago, this blog displayed a few instances of what has been called cartocacoethes (i.e. the uncontrollable urge to see maps in everyday, non-cartography-related objects; see #350). As promised at the time, other examples submitted would be collected in a follow-up post, a long-dormant project now awakened by Mr Lovejoy’s Asphalt Maine.
2. Squagellan

“Some squirrel nibbled the continent of South America on one of my pumpkins,” reported Seth Masket. “It’s freaking me out.” Seth named this inadvertent piece of pumpkin cartography Squagellan, a portmanteau of the culprit, and the explorer Magellan (who sailed around the continent along the Straits that bear his name). Curiously, there are no squirrels in South America.
3. Mosstralia

Brian Olewnick suggested the work of artist Nina Katchadourian, who in the early 1990s made a series of accidental maps based on moss formations. More information here on the artist’s website. 
“There is a type of lichen which is very common in the Finnish archipelago and my family’s summer house sits on a large granite hill covered with it. I have always seen certain shapes as islands or continents, and decided to affix rub-on letters directly to the lichens to identify them as the places I recognized. When I had finished, the whole hill had become a kind of scrambled atlas.”
4. Rustralia

Alan Dow took this photo of a bit of rust on a steel smoking shelter at work. “I was just testing the macro function on my new camera and didn’t notice the remarkable similarity to Australia at the time! Yes? No?”
Link here.
5. Drown Under

“I always thought this one looked roughly like Australia”, writes kwigibo. “What with tides and erosion being what they are in this particular body of water I’m sure it looked a lot more like Australia at one point.”
6. Urinalia

For some strange reason, the shape of Australia is a popular subject of cartocacoethes. This one was taken by Christian Rothholz in the men’s room of a cinema in Hamburg, Germany. The peculiar shape of this piece of chewing gum had been noticed by other patrons, who had added the words Australia and Down Under to it for good measure.
7. Gingerbread DC

Sent in by Nikolas Schiller, the cartographic artist, blogger and tireless advocate for Washington DC’s repesentation in Congress. The gingerbread, with straight lines on three sides, does mirror the instantly recognisable shape of DC. The District of Columbia was selected as the nation’s capital in 1790 on a site along the banks of the Potomac River. Originally a perfect square with 10 miles to each side, with territory taken from both Maryland (on the Potomac’s northern bank) and Virginia (on the southern bank), DC achieved its present irregular shape with the return of all territory south of the Potomac to Virginia in 1846.
8. Estonia Door Mat

A picture of this door mat was was sent in by Teele Tani, from Riga in Latvia. The worn-out patch on the door mat resembles Latvia’s northern neighbour, Estonia. Recognising your neighbouring country in a door mat might seem disrespectful, but the resemblance, it has to be admitted, is uncanny, with even the Baltic islands of Hiiumaa and Saaremaa recognisable in their respective positions north and south off Estonia’s western coastline.
9. Montana Wall Map

“My church rents space in a much older church building in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC,” writes Evan Sparks. “A few weeks ago, the church that owns the building began a renovation project in the nave that includes replastering parts of the wall. To my delight, one of the sections currently in progress looks uncannily like the state of Montana.”
10. Eggmerica

This sunny side up map of Eggmerica was sent in by Cory Zacker: “When I emailed this to my aunt, her reply was, Wow! Lots of sun in the Midwest!” It takes some squinting to recognise the shape of the (contiguous) US, but some of the country’s most easily recognised shapes are all there, albeit in somewhat distorted form – the slight concavity of the west coast, the convexity of the east coast, the Maine, Florida and southern Texas protrusions and the bend of the Gulf Coast connecting the latter two.
11. United Steak

Similarly, this steak conveys, however imperfectly, some of the US’s outer shapes.”I call it The United Steak of America”, says Jeff Malec, who sent it in.
12. A More Perfect Union

Another steak, another US map (this one sent in by Radich Kulker). The steak looks real, but the borders are too perfect – was an initial likeness moulded into a more perfect one? By hand or photoshop?
13. United Cracks

This picture – again of something resembling the US – was taken by Liam Mulshine on a trip along Italy’s Amalfi Coast. “We hiked by (and through) many buildings that were completely abandoned on the steep hills not far from the Mediterranean. Looking by the front door of one of the buildings, I suddenly saw a little grey map of the United States, ran up to get a closer look, and was astounded to discover it was (as far as I could tell) just a large crack in the building, where some material had fallen off. It just happens to look amazingly like the US! Overlooking some imperfections (like the peninsula jutting out of North Carolina), the similarities are really intriguing- there’s Texas, Florida, the Puget Sound in Washington State, the straight-line border with Canda in the Northwest, Maine, and even EACH of the Great Lakes!” 
14.

And to conclude the series of US-impersonating objects, here’s a napkin posing as the Lower 48, sent in by Eric D. Meyerson, found here.
15. The Land of the Long White Cloud

Michelle Holshue sent in this picture, which she took in Costa Rica some years ago. The cloud formation over the ocean reminded her of New Zealand – and with some justification: the angle of the cloud constellation conforms to that of the New Zealand archipelago’s two main islands on most maps. The top of the cloud is shaped like NZ’s North Island, its bottom like South Island. A break in the cloud formation suggests the Cook Strait, separating both islands. The similarity between the cloud and the country is even more striking when one considers that the indigenous Maori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa, a name commonly translated as… the land of the long white cloud.
16. Afrika Stan

Africa is a piece of stucco missing from a wall in Stockholm’s gamla stan (old town), sent in by Michele Aquila. The likeness is rather tenuous, but gets the general bow-shapedness (i.e. the position of the Gulf of Guinea) of the continent right. There’s even a little protrusion where the Horn of Africa should be.
17. Café Latino

Emmanuel Parfond also suffers from the occasional bout of cartocacoethes*. Like when he took this picture, of South America showing up in his cup of coffee. Again, a rather rudimentary shape, and not altogether dissimilar to the African one discussed above. But something – the slenderness of the figure, the angle of the coastlines, or maybe the fact that this was a nice cup of Colombian coffee – suggests South America rather than Africa.
18. Surreal Cereal: Illinois As a Corn Flake

Thanks to Peter Gordon Kurilecz for pointing out this bizarre and lucrative example of cartocacoethes. Two Virginia sisters sold this Illinois-shaped corn flake on eBay for $1,350 to someone who intended to add it to a travelling trivia museum. The story made the headlines in March 2008, linked to here. 
19. Air New Jersey

Jim sent in this picture of a cloud-lookalike of New Jersey, with the state’s two interlocking shapes of North Jersey and South Jersey easily recognisable. However, the state is tilted too much towards the left.
20. Argentine Floor Map

“On the floor of my grandmother’s house I see the shape of a province of my country called Entre Ríos, which is the province where I live,” writes Carlos Zelayeta from Argentina. “Entre Ríos has two coasts: the Paraná coast in the west, and the Uruguay coast in the east. The Paraná coast is quite similar to this map. At the south of Uruguay is missing a curve in the Gualeguaychú latitude. There is a little line that gets to Uruguay coast and it could be the stream ‘El Palmar’. The part over Entre Ríos is similar to the province of Corrientes, with the two rivers coming from the north.” For those not familiar with the shape of the aforementioned province, compare here. 
21. Double Whammy on a Granadilla

Let’s finish this series on a double whammy, sent in by Ricardo Rodríguez Quintero from Colombia after reading the previous cartacacoethical entry on this blog: “I was about to eat a granadilla and just before smashing it, I couldn’t help seeing USA’s map on its skin and when I turned it around I could find a (less accurate and/or obvious) map of Thailand. Maybe my ‘cartocacoethical’ sense sharpened after reading your post.”
Now you’ve read this entry, this might happen to you too. If you see any exceptional examples of cartocacoethes/cartococcygia, please do send them in!
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*: Cacoethes is a Greek word used to express uncontrollable urge or desire, especially for something harmful. Strange Maps might be prejudiced, but we think seeing maps everywhere is harmless, if not downright beneficial. A somewhat friendlier term for the condition suggested by one of the commenters in the original post is cartococcygia. Literally: maps built by cuckoos – analogous to nephelococcygia (a term for seeing shapes in clouds, from The Birds by Aristophanes , literally: clouds built by cuckoos)

Cartozoology, the discipline dedicated to the discovery and study of animals outlined paradigmatically by street layouts as they appear on maps, took almost three decades to mature from idea to reality. It was conceived in 1974 on a plane between Oslo and Reykjavik; but the Norwegian Cartozoological Society was founded only in 2003. It seems to have produced only a handful of specimens and now appears to be dormant.
But what beauty, grace and humour those few specimens exhibit!
Patient zero of cartozoology was the Ur-Fish, a sea-dweller whose rudimentary shape was summarily extracted from Oslo’s grid of city streets. Later examples show more elegance and sophistication. A personal favourite is the West Side Riesenterrier (Canis diplomaticus), discovered between Oslo’s Slotsparken and Frognerparken in January 2003 by Roger Pihl, Secretary-General of the NCS.

Another nice one is the Ring-Nosed Dala Horse (Equus vallis circumnasata), discovered in March of 2003 by Eilert Sundt, another NCS Secretary-General.

Maybe it’s time to wake the NCS from its slumber, and expand the scope of cartozoology beyond its initial (and only) hunting grounds in Scandinavia. Here is the original NGS website in Norwegian (English version here). Strange Maps also welcomes new examples of cartozoology, and will showcase the best examples if and when enough fitting specimens are sent in.
Cartozoology was brought to our attention by musubana in the comments section of the recent entry on the Afro-Latinosaurus Rex (#420).

Faith and reason, usually jostling for primacy over one another, unite on this map to describe [t]he Earth-sphere after the Deluge in its broken state, shown with Mountains and valleys, great Sea-Bosom and Islands and Shallows of the same. The map was produced for Willem and Jan Goeree’s (1) immensely popular book Introductions to Biblical Knowledge (2), and apparently is based on a similar hemisphere map illustrating Thomas Burnet’s Sacred History of the World (3).
Burnet’s is an interesting book, the first British attempt to marry rational and biblical explanations for the genesis of the world. It typifies a wider attempt to unantagonise the progress of science with the doctrines of faith, by looking for natural rather than supernatural mechanisms behind divine intervention (4).
The problem, in this case at least, is that Burnet did so merely by faith in science, unburdened by any actual scientific facts. Burnet speculated that Noah’s Flood was only possible by the emergence of water from the earth’s hollow interior (a very popular and persistent misconception, see #85).
Burnet was quite selective in which pseudoscientific theories he found acceptable. When Isaac Newton suggested to him that the days might have been longer during Creation Week (supposedly to explain for the loads of work God got done), Burnet objected: the Supreme Being would not bend Nature’s laws.
As per Burnet’s example, this hemispherical presentation by the Goerees of the post-Flood continents shows, in a lighter blue, plenty of areas throughout the oceans which used to be dry land before the Deluge. The (non-existent) polar lands, Europe and Africa are linked by the light-blue areas, which also extend in all directions from Africa, and generally connect all now separate land masses to each other (did Burnet and the Goerees perhaps think this might explain why men and beasts live in places like America and Australia, isolated by vast expanses of water from the rest of the world?)
The Goeree map is also an interesting snapshot of Europe’s geographic knowledge in the late 17th century, which with all its misconceptions was approaching something resembling our present vision of the continents, having moved away from the purely symbolic tryptich maps (more on those at #87). Notable errors include the Arctic lands (see also #116), California as an island (see also #71), the sea where Alaska should be, the attachment of Greenland to what seems to be a Canadian mainland, of Australia to New Guinea.
Many thanks to peacay over at the ever excellent BibliOdyssey for sending in this map. Image found here on Old World Auctions, where a copy of the map recently sold for $375.
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(1) A Dutch father-and-son publishing team. Interestingly, their family name is that of a former island in the Dutch river delta (possibly their family’s ancestral home); the name of which was transplanted by Dutch seafarers to the island of Goree, just off the Senegalese coast, which has become a symbol of the transatlantic slave trade.
(3) In the original Dutch: Voor-Bereidselen Tot de Bybelsche Wysheid (1690).
(3) In the original Latin: Telluris Sacra Historia (1681). First English edition in 1684.
(4) In the same vein, Burnet would later postulate that the Fall of Man might not have been an actual historical event, but rather a symbolic one.

How little information do you need to be able to draw a map? This zen-like question provided the basis for a short article in the May 21st, 1971 issue of Nature, intriguingly entitled Construction of Maps from “Odd Bits of Information”.
The article, according to its author David G. Kendall of Cambridge University’s Statistical Laboratory, starts from a “rather general principle in historical geography”, i.e. that maps can indeed be produced from apparently inadequate data, and goes on to describe a research programme based on that principle, carried out by Kendall’s lab.
The research concentrated on setting up a suitable (dis)simularity matrix believed to “lie naturally” in a Euclidian space of k dimensions, making use of a computer programme called MD-SCAL. The article mentions two experiments, the first one involving the mapping of eight parishes of the district of Otmoor in Oxfordshire. Amazingly, a fairly accurate map for the eight parishes was extrapolated solely from data on the intermarriage rates between them for the period 1600-1850.
The second experiment involved a map of 88 French departments (excluding the Corsican and Parisian ones), with the only information available being “whether or not one of the 3,828 pairs of departments shares a common boundary.” The map thus computer-produced is one “in which each department is represented by a point, but this system of linked points is converted to a honeycomb of cells by exploiting a natural duality.”
Mr Kendall finally mentions a future experiment with MD-SCAL: “The next step [...] will be to attempt to reconstruct a fifteenth century manor from the abuttals in a contemporary cartulary.”
These maps show France as it really is, and France reconstructed from abuttal data. Please note that the departments are numbered not in the usual alphabetical order, but by “an alternative which approximately orders the departments first by longitude and then by latitude.”

Many thanks to Randall B. Irmis, the paleontologist who sent in these maps, and whose attention was originally drawn to the article following this one, on the dinosaur species called Hypsilophodon.

Like Russia or the UK, Turkey is the successor state to a once dominant world power. And much as in those other countries, nostalgic memories of Empire (the Ottoman one, in Turkey’s case) compare unfavourably with today’s status as merely a ‘normal’ country.
All former superpowers must deal with a world that is decidedly less impressed by them than before. The resulting frustration is confined (mainly) to the extremist fringes of politics. But in those margins, chauvinist delusions of grandeur conspire to make up for lost glories. Point in case is Russia’s projected ‘Third Empire’ (see entry #177).
This map is another example of geopolitical grandstanding, but from a Turkish perspective. It shows what a global empire based on pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism would look like – a mega-state combining the Ummah (the lands where Islam dominates) with Turan (the name for all countries and regions inhabited by Turkic people). The Empire thus projected results from the maximum overlap of two distinct ideologies of which Turkey is, in the mind of the map-maker at least, the natural point of convergence. The Turkish-Islamic Empire (I can only infer that translation of the map’s title) occupies:

Turkey in its present form, of course;
The whole of Cyprus;
Certain Muslim-majority areas in the Balkans, i.e. Bosnia and Albania
As well as Eastern European regions where Turks or related nationalities live: in Bulgaria, the Crimea, southern Moldavia (i.e. Gagauzia)
In Western Europe, areas where Turks or other Muslims are heavily present, i.e. France, Germany and Spain;
Most of Africa north of the Equator (with notable exception of Liberia, parts of Nigeria, Mali, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia) and some parts to the south of it, namely the coastal areas of Kenia and Tanzania, and an enclave in the DR Congo;
The whole of the Middle East, excluding Lebanon (partly Christian), but including Iran;
A large part of the former Soviet Union, including all the central Asian republics (Turkic and Muslim) and large areas of Russia proper (indigenous Turkic peoples, who generally aren’t Muslim);
Mongolia, East Turkestan (Chinese at present, recently the scene of riots between native Turkic muslims and immigrated Han Chinese);
Afghanistan, Pakistan, almost all of India, half of Sri Lanka, all of Bangladesh, the whole of Indonesia and Malaysia and even the only partially muslim Philippines.

As a nationalist movement, pan-Turkism’s rise and heyday coincided with similar ideologies in 19th and 20th century Europe, such as Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism and even Zionism. Nationalism seems a largely discredited and spent force nowadays. Pan-Islamism is a bit more a la mode, as Islam as a global political force has been in the ascendant in recent decades.
It is, however, not clear that political Islam’s agenda is driven by a vision of the Caliphate, the once and future Empire covering the Ummah, under one ruler uniting absolute spiritual authority with temporal power. But surely it is significant, especially for this vision of a Turko-Islamic Empire, that the last holder of the title of Caliph, however symbolic by that time, was the last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, deposed by Ataturk’s secularist republic.
 Which lends extra poignancy to the vision of Turkey as the lynchpin of this empire, covering all Muslims and all Turks. However, at no point did any sultan even come close to uniting all Turks and Muslims, or even all Turks or Muslims, in one state. So this Turko-Islamic Empire isn’t an object of nostalgia, but a political project. One can see why this would come naturally to hardcore Turkish nationalists, but it’s hard to see what’s in it for those who do not share their ‘overlap’. Why would a Siberian shaman feel any desire to be a citizen of the same state as a West African Muslim? Or vice versa?
Many thanks to Ilya Vinarski, another_m69, and others who contributed this map, found here.

It takes aspiring London cabbies two to four years to acquire ‘The Knowledge’. Only if they know their way around the 25,000 streets in a 6-mile radius from Charing Cross (and along 320 main roads within Greater London) will they be licensed to drive one of London’s iconic black cabs. The London Taxicab Examination System is reputed to be the hardest of its kind in the world, and this speaks to the complexity of the British capital’s road grid.
That complexity, and the cabbies’ Knowledge, put passengers at the risk of being overcharged, the Victorians feared. Mid-19th century, even before the current Examination System was instituted (in 1865), a Mr John Leighton devised a system to prevent passengers from being taken for a proverbial as well as a literal ride. Leighton, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, published a scheme to divide London in a number of hexagonals, specifically aimed at preventing overcharging by cab drivers.
“John Leighton suggested that the old borough boundaries should be altered to conform to a honeycomb pattern. Within a 5-mile radius of the General Post Office all the sprawling, differently sized boroughs were to become hexagonal-shaped areas, 2 miles across. There were 19 altogether with the City in the centre of the honeycomb. Each hexagonal borough would be identified by a letter, and the letter as well as a number would be painted or cut out of tin-plate to be visible by day and night on lampposts at every street corner.”
The proposal for a hexagonal London is described in London As It Might Have Been, a book by Felix Barber and Ralph Hyde, also detailing plans for a giant pyramid to house the remains five million dead Londoners, and a scheme to erect a structure in Wembley to dwarf the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Leighton’s hexagonal plan obviously never came to fruition; it is strangely reminiscent of a proposal dating from 1790 by Jacques-Guillaume Thouret to divide France into completely rectangular departments (#159) and of the ideal, geometric city as envisioned by Sir Ebenezer Howard in 1898 (#234).
Of the two maps shown here (*), the one the left shows the Metropolitan Parliamentary Boroughs as Constituted Under the Act of 1855, centred on the City, and shown with their subdivisions (St Pancras, for example, is divided in N, S, E and W). The result is a veritable hodgepodge of miniscule fiefdoms. The map on the right presents a more regimented view of London, re-divided in 2-mile hexagon-shaped boroughs, centred around the City in three concentric circles.
Six boroughs in the first circle are numbered thus (clockwise from the top):

1 Islington
2 Bethnal Green
3 Southwark
4 Kennington
5 Westminster
6 St Pancras

Twelve boroughs in the second circle are numbered thus (clockwise from the top):

1a Hornsey
2a Hackney
3a Old Ford
4a Poplar
5a Deptford
6a Peckham
7a Brixton
8a Battersea
9a Chelsea
10a Marylebone
11a St John’s Wood
12a Kentish Town

Nineteen boroughs, unnumbered, are in the third circle (clockwise from the top:

Tottenham
Stamford Hill
Leyton Essex
Forest Gate
West Ham
Blackwall
Greenwich
Lewisham
Forest Hill
Norwood
Balham
Wandsworth
Fulham
Kensington
Paddington
?
Hampstead
Highgate

Many thanks to Simon Austin for sending in this map, found on Kosmograd, a blog animated by an interest in, among other things, utopian architecture, disurbanism, cyberspace. The relevant post starts from this original hexagonal idea to produce a contemporary hexagonal map of London.
(*) a bit dark and hazy; any image of better quality is very welcome.

If the saying is true that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, then landlocked, frigate-less Moldova is only halfway there. The Eastern European republic, celebrated for its obscurity, has struggled with its national identity ever since breaking free of the Soviet bear-hug in the early 1990s.
Formerly known as the Soviet republic of Moldavia, Moldova shares its language with neighbouring Romania (1), but insists on calling it Moldovan rather than Romanian. This doesn’t half annoy the Romanians, who would like to see the matter rectified before Moldova joins them in the European Union (2).
But while the Moldovans were busy maintaining that they are not Romanian, some of their countrymen were keen to stress that they are not Moldovan. As with most post-soviet national identities, Moldova’s was based on the dominant ethnicity, leaving minorities wondering what they were doing in a state run by Moldovans and for Moldovans. This spurred two separate autonomist movements.
The mainly Russian region of Transnistria has seceded with support of the Russian army, and is maintained by it in in a state of phantom-nationhood. Its obscure history – and especially its strange shape – has been described on entry #311 of this blog. Another, more amicable path towards autonomy was achieved by the Gagauz, a tribe of Turkish-speaking orthodox Christians whose homeland, in the south of Moldova, received a degree of autonomy – and the promise of independence, if Moldova chooses to (re)unite with Romania.
Where the Gagauz came from, is unclear. Local historians have listed over 20 different theories on their origins. There is even uncertainty about the origin of the ethnonym itself. ‘Gagauz’ might mean ’straight nose’, it possibly refers to the Oghuz tribe, or it could be a reference to Kaykaus II, a Seljuk Sultan who settled in the area. Wrapping this riddle in a mystery is the fact that, before they migrated from Bulgaria to areas vacated by the Nogai tribe in present-day Moldova, Gagauz referred to themselves as “old Bulgars” or “true Bulgars”. The question whether the Gagauz are turkified Bulgars or christianised Turks is hardly trivial – we are, after all, in the Balkans – but very difficult to answer.
During the 20th century, the Gagauz have been independent twice, albeit very briefly. In 1906, a peasant uprising led to the Republic of Komrat, which collapsed after either 5 or 15 days (sources vary). In August 1990, Gagauzia proclaimed its autonomy, mainly in reaction to Moldova’s adoption of Moldovan as its official language. On 18 August 1991, the day of the Moscow coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, Gagauzia proclaimed its independence. Transnistria would follow its example in September 1991. Both declarations were annulled by the Moldovan government.
While Transnistria and Moldova are still at odds with each other, Gagauzia came back into the fold. On 23 December 1994, the Moldovan parliament approved Gagauzia’s current special status. The size of the region was determined by referendum, three towns and 27 villages wanting to be included. The Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia (3) consists of four separate areas in the southern part of Moldova, near the border tripoint with Romania and Ukraine. The largest, northern area contains the region’s capital, Komrat.
The names of all localities on this map are marked in the region’s three official languages, Romanian/Moldovan, Gagauz and Russian (here transcribed in the Latin alphabet), and to some comic effect when the names are exactly the same (Avdarma/Avdarma/Avdarma). The region’s official names are G?g?uzia (in Moldovan/Romanian), Gagauz-Yeri (in Gagauz) and ???????? (in Russian).
Information about Gagauzia is scarce, apart from the most basic statistics. The area’s total surface is 1,832 km2, its population hovers around the 150,000 mark, 83% of which is Gagauz. The capital Komrat is home to 23,000 people, and its main industries are rugs, butter and wine. A National Museum of Gagauz People and History is located in the town of Besalma (”Five Apples”). About 40% of the Gagauz are city-dwellers, and of those, 18% has a phone (in comparison to only 8% of rural Gagauz). The Gagauz elect their own Governor (Guvernator in Moldovan/Romanian, Bashkan in Gagauz), at present Mihail Formuzal.
This map found here on Wikipedia. 
 
(1) Itself formerly known under the slightly more menacing-sounding moniker of Rumania. See also Belarus, formerly known as Belorussia. These countries not only dropped ‘Soviet’ and/or ‘socialist’ from their titulature, but found it necessary to modify their proper name. The implied critique is that the communists couldn’t even get the spelling of their countries right – the ultimate insult of a failed utopian project.
(2) A dispute reminiscent of the one between Greece, which sees itself as the sole custodian of all matters Macedonian, and the Former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, which on Greece’s intransigent insistence still has to circumspectly describe itself on international fora with the acronym FYROM. It might yet catch on, and the proud Fyromans will then have a toponym all of their own to defend.
(3) Or ATUG. Cf sup.