Sandcastle Terrorist

This sandcastle map of Manhattan comes from what is undoubtedly one of the New Yorker's most retroactively shocking covers. Published after the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, the image suggests that whatever other nonsense people have said about how 9/11 changed everything, it certainly made jokes about destroying the World Trade Center a lot less acceptable. Also perhaps indicative of a slightly more innocent era is the artist's absurd decision to make the terrorist as a freckled, red-haired kid, then give him a kaffiyeh. Surely drawing an all-american rascal dressing up as an Arab to be a terrorist wouldn't be as offensive as drawing an Arab kid as the terrorist...

Drug Routes

In previous posts on cold war propaganda and Cyprus I've revealed my love of 1950s newspaper maps. Here are  two more from the November 6 issue Vatan, 1956. The first shows drug - literally "poison" - trafficking routes. The second is devoted to global commerce of a different sort. As with most good maps this top one doesn't really need much explanation, or much translation. afyon is opium, the others should be pretty self explanatory. It is striking how much has changed in the global drug trade. At this point cocaine was still produced in Peru, not Columbia, and consumed in Europe, not America. What's more the cocaine reaching the US came via England. The caption goes on to explain that Chinese opium was brought to America by Japanese smugglers while Lebanese opium reached Europe via Sicily and Corsica. Hash, it notes, is produced in Egypt and mostly consumer there. The giant marijuana arrow from Mexico to the US is about the one thing that remained constant.

Opium trafficking, interestingly, was one of the few diplomatic problems that arose between the otherwise fairly isolated US and Turkish governments during the 1930s. It again became an issue in the 1970s, when Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit defied American pressure and lifted Turkey's ban on poppy cultivation in solidarity with Turkish farmers. Now, Turkey is the source much of the legally purchased opium used for making medicine in the US. An interesting op-ed offers one account of how this came to be.

Finally, the GE ad below advertises the fact that since a billion GE bulbs are sold every year there is one bulb for every two people on earth.

Canakkale Handkerchief

Canakkale Victory Handkerchief


I wish I'd seen this before our last Canakkale map post. The Turks made their Canakkale propaganda maps after the battle, the British made theirs before. This is a silk victory handerchief (did we mention it was British) celebrating the allied attack on the straights. On the bottom left of the map are the words "To Constantinople" at the mouth of the Dardenelles, while the silouhette of the city stands as the ultimate objective in the top right. On the corners are sheilds with the Australian and New Zealand flags and the words "well done" along with a the one to the left titled "Eclipse of the Star and Crescent." There's no evidence the British actually had a flag like this in mind for conquered Ottoman territory, although it certainly does a good job of getting their general intentions across. The original handkerchief is on display at the Iskenderun Deniz Muzesi, which is definitely worth a visit if you're in Iskenderun. Unfortunately this is the best picture I managed to get of it.

Goat Map, Sheep Map

This is one of the greatest  map ever made. Taken from a 1958 issue of the always informative Journal of the Ankara University Faculty of Language, History and Geography, this map show the distribution of Goats in a portion of southern Anatolia located along the Mediterranean coast west of Antalya and immediately east of Kas. As the key explains, each dot represents 20 goats. Below is the full Goat Distribution map next to a map of sheep distribution for the same region. The astute reader will notice that some areas have sheep but not goats while other areas have goats but not sheep. Still other areas stand out for the presence of both goats and sheep. We would also draw your attention to a region in the upper right corner of the Goat Distribution map with three large circles, each one of which represents two thousand (2,000) goats.

Of course, there is more to this study than just goats and sheep. For a complete pdf copy, click here.

Goats

Sheep

Source: Talip Yucel, Mart-Haziran 1958 Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakultesi Dergisi

Goats

Today's map comes from the remakble David Rumsey collection (http://www.davidrumsey.com/) which has historical maps from pretty much everywhere digitized and available for online viewing. This map, from an Italian atlas, shows the distribution of goats in Turkey, of the Angora and non-Angora varieties.
In the absence of any profound historical insight, and still embarrassed to have only recently learned that Mohair and Angora wool are the same thing (Cashmere, meanwhile, comes from goats from Kashmir) I'm just going to quote the wikipedia article on Angora Goats: "Angora goats were first introduced in the United States in 1849 by Dr. James P. Davis. Seven adult goats were a gift from Sultan Abdülmecid I in appreciation for his services and advice on the raising of cotton. More goats were imported over time, until the Civil War destroyed most of the large flocks in the south." Also, "The word "mohair" was adopted into English before 1570 from the Arabic: مخير mukhayyar, a type of haircloth, literally 'choice', from khayyara, 'he chose'." Finally, Angora goats appeared on the 50 lira note between 1938-1952. They are believed to have been the first goats to do so.

Greater Greece

This French map shows Greater or Megali Greece at the moment it appeared to have become a reality. In 1919 the British, worried about resistance from Turkish nationalists as well as the possibility that Italian forces would try to seize Izmir, encouraged their allies the Greeks to land troops in Izmir and take possession  of part of Asia Minor. Greeks had long claimed this territory, based both on its Greek-speaking, Orthodox population and its historical importance in the classical age. Famously, the Greek landing coincided with Mustafa Kemal's journey to Samsun, after which he established control of the nascent Turkish nationalist movement. The British were all too eager to see Greek forces try to solidify their territorial gains by advancing into Anatolia to crush the nationalist movement. When this effort failed catastrophically, Greek forces were driven out of Anatolia and ultimately forced to abandon the territory they had gained in Thrace as well. The Bosphorus and Dardanelles, as well as the region around them, are marked here as under international control as per the treaty of Sevres. It is hard to look at this map and not wonder how enduring a Greek victory in 1922 really could have been. Given the geographic and demographic dynamics, would Turkey have inevitably retaken this territory anyways?

Communist Maps

A chess set that Stalin gave to Ismet Inonu featuring bound workers against liberated communist women. It is now on display at the Inonu Foundation Museum in Ankara

The Manichean clash between capitalism and communism proved quite conducive to making propaganda maps and novelty chess sets (see above). The Turkish press illustrated the struggle with maps like these, using bright colors to show changes in the global balance of power or developments in particular regions (these appeared in Ulus during the mid 1950s). In the bottom map, China appears as a light pink to the Soviet Union's darker red as it tries to spread Communist influence throughout southeast asia.