Afternoon Map

Nick Danforth, Georgetown University

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To celebrate the end of Ramadan and the beginning of the fall eating season (August 15-October 31st), we are posting our official Istanbul Food Map. Developed after much arguing with collaborators (thanks go to to Irina Levin, Chris Trapani and H.G. Masters), this map shows some of the best places to eat some of the best foods in the city, as well a bunch of others. I realize many visitors to this site are either natives of the city themselves or longtime residents, who will have their own strong, quite possibly more qualified, opinions on these issues. Everyone is free to disagree (except about lades, which really is unarguably the best menemen in the world), Consider this, at least, something to send to friends who email asking for recommendations about where to go and what to eat in Istanbul. As a recent New York Times article on "food sherpas" revealed, many people are apparently incapable of doing something as basic as eating on their own without some kind of pseudo-professional advice. While I have aways enjoyed Istanbul Eats, I am troubled by the idea that a visitor searching for, say, good kokoreç would be better off having the site's advice instead of simply the good sense to stop when they saw someone selling kokoreç.

In that spirit, many of the recommendations on this map are arbitrary, outdated, or downright inaccurate. Is their any reason to go the Üsküdar for çiğ köfte? of course not. it tastes the same at chains around the city. But why not? likewise, Haci Baba's was replaced by some Antakya medeniyet sofrasi years ago, as part of a regrettable trend of mediocre restaurants trying to capitalize on Antakya's hard-earned reputation for excellent cuisine. Until they start making better hummus, this map won't recognize them. fınally Sinerji has never actually served Efes, but it also refuses to servee Bomonti, which is pretty much the best you can hope for now.

Anyways, if you or anyone you know is planning a trip to Istanbul, here are some places to consider.

Çiğ Köfte (Spice Bulgur Meatballs): These used to be made with raw meat, but are now, by law, entirely vegetarian. You can't tell the difference until the next morning when you realize you aren't sick

Efes (Beer, plus a certain percentage of water): Sinerji Bar. Beer is ordered by size. Otuzluk for a small, ellilik for a large.

Iskender (Yogurt) Kebab / Beyti (wrapped) Kebab: Cihangir Kebab Shop. You can get the 1.5 portion if you're worried about not having enough

Karnıyarık, Imam Bayıldı (Stuffed Eggplant): Haci Baba. Pretty much anything with eggplant here is great

Kokoreç (Lamb Intestine): Kadıköy Bazaar. Specifically, there's a place on the right as you're walking up to the bazaar that's good. The intestine is so well fried and spiced it hardly tastes like intestine anymore

Mantı (Turkish Ravioli): Kardeşim Lokantası. There's a lot of mediocre manti in the world. Kardeşim has some of the best in . The dried yogurt topping tastes just like parmasan cheese

Menemen (Turkish Omelet): Lades Khavaltı Salonu. Peynirli (with cheese), Sucuklu (with sausage), or Pastırmalı (with pastrami) recommended. The cream and honey plate is also, obviously, delicious

Midiye Dolma (Stuffed mussles): Kumkapı Neighborhood. Midiye Dolma were traditionally associated with the city's Armenian community. The Armenian patriarchate can still be visited near kumkapı.

Sahlep (warm, thick winter beverage): At Saray, you can sit outside and sip salep in the winter. Salep is unique: it's a sweet, thick creamy beverage made from flour ground from the roots of orchids, with lots of spices added in.

Tea: Istanbul Deniz Otobusleri Ferryboats. Everything is better on boats, including tea. In the winter, you can also get Sahlep, either on deck or from the boat cantina

Today's post is a tribute to the Bulgarian Fire Marshall, who has provided remarkablay detailed instructions for evacuating a number of historic buildings, including an Ottoman House (above), a Tower (below left), and an Orthodox Church (below right). Basically if you're behind the iconostasis, use the side door, otherwise exit from the nave.

Nick Danforth, Georgetown University

The second installment of Afternoon Map's Bulgaria week, this time featuring some amazing 1980s imagery. The first four images are covers of tourist maps from the era, about which we have little to say other than that they really are amazing. The map cover on the left shows the full range of attractions available in Bulgaria, from sailing on the Black Sea to visiting quaint Ottoman-era houses to seeing the giant Communist monument at Buzluca. By Car Through Bulgaria includes useful information for the traveler, including the fact that a 12% reduction is granted to those who buy gasoline scrips in hard currency (these can be obtained at the frontier checkpoints, at the Central Council of the Bulgarian Automobile and Touring Club and at the Balkantourist offices in larger towns and resorts). Also free medical care is given in all emergency cases until the patient's life is out of danger. The next image is of the city of Plovdiv, as pleasant a place now as it appears on the map cover. Finally, a German map of Romania from the same era, for East German citizens looking for a camping vacation in one of the nearby countries they were allowed to travel to.

This next pair of maps are from the regional history museum in the city of Kardjali, housed in a building originally designed in the 1930s to be Bulgaria's main madrasa. They seem to show something about the spread of Thracian cultural influence in the ancient world, but we're showing them here for their elegantly square rendering of the Eastern Mediterranean region.

Finally, it's impossible to write about 1980s Bulgarian maps without including another photo from the Karacali museum of the two most impressive looking explorers I've ever seen: Kaptan Georgi Georgiev and Kosmonaut Georgi Ivanov, 1979. As best I could tell, Georgiev (left) circumnavigated the globe on his yacht. Ivanov, of course, was "launched into space as part of the Soyuz 33 mission from Baikonur Cosmodrome on April 10, 1979, at 17:34 (GMT).Though take-off was smooth, the mission was a disaster, with severe damage of the engine preventing docking in orbit to Salyut 6 orbital station as it was initially planned. A premature return to Earth became the only possible decision for Ivanov and Rukavishnikov. Due to some additional technical problems landing was difficult to endure-more than 9Gs. When Soyuz 33 finally landed, it was 320 km southeast of Dzhezkazgan. It completed 31 orbits, and was in space for 1 day, 23 hours and 1 minute."

Nick Danforth, Georgetown University

The final, more serious, installment of our Bulgarian map week examines the commemoration of the Batak Massacre, a seminal event in Bulgarian national(ist) history and one of the incidents that helped cement accusation of Ottoman bloodthirstyness in European minds. The image above is from a historical map showing Cete, or nationalist militia activity during the April 1876 uprising. Clashes, such as the one in Batak (bottom left) that prompted the Ottoman massacre, are shown with crossed swords.

In April of 1876, the town of Batak was the site of one of a number of armed uprisings by Bulgarian nationalist militias against the Ottoman government. Ottoman forces, including irregulars and members of the region's Muslim population, put down the insurrection, then proceeded to kill a - needless to say highly disputed - number of the town's inhabitants. The climax of the massacre occurred in and around the church of Sveta Nedelya where a number of people had sought refuge. reports at the time, most famously from American journalist Januarius MacGahan, described the death of 5,000 people and the impalement of the town's mayor. Press reports, as well as the work of a subsequent international commission, prompted widespread outrage accross Europe. William Gladstone response came in the form of The Bulgarian Horrors, a pamphlet that condemned the Disreali government on moral grounds for its policy of supporting the Ottoman Empire. While the April uprisings themselves were unsusccesful, the subsequent 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War (reffered to by Bulgarians as the Russo-Turkish War for National liberation) led to the creation of an independant Bulgaria. Partially on account of anti-Turkish sentiment, Britain refrained from intervening on the Ottomans' behalf (though they did use their influence to limit the size of the new state in the Treaty of Berlin). Batak entered the new state's repetoire of nationalist symbols, where it remains to this day. Most recently, a controversy erupted in 2007 when two historians attempted to hold a conference on the "Batak Myth," in which they sought to reconsider the size of the massacre itself and examine how it had been enshrined as a national myth.

Though these two historiographical projects - questioning the truth of nationalist myths and studying their creation - often go hand in hand, they are ultimately separate endeavors. Exaggeration and distortion are certainly part of mythmaking, but whether in Batak or San Antonio, even nationalist myths built from largely accurate accounts can and should be critically examined, particularly in regard to the nature of their construction and subsequent use. Visiting the town of Batak itself also offers a striking reminder that, beneath the politics and propaganda and arguments over numbers, sites of tragic violence can preserve a truly haunting quality in spite, rather than because of, our attempts to commemorate them.

On the hill above the town of Batak, visible from some distance, stands a Communist-era memorial to the massacre, combining massive socialist realist statuary with crucifixion iconography. The local history museum, built in the 1950s, is jointly dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Batak massacre, Bulgaria's failed 1923 socialist revolution and the 1944 anti-fascist resistance movement.

The church of Sveta Nedelya, where much of the violence took place, houses an icon, painted by a Bulgarian nun in California, depicting events from the massacre as if scenes from a saint's martyrdom. In fact, the victims of the massacres were officially cannonized as saints in 2011.

Within the church, bullet-holes in the wall, remnants of charred wood, and skulls of the victims are presented as historical and religious relics.

Outside the church, a carved sign offers a more traditional nationalist folk art rendering of the scene, focusing on military heroism rather than victimhood.

Nearby a khachkar, or traditional Armenian memorial stone, was erected in 2008 by the Armenian community in Bulgaria (at least according to a Russian-speaker's translation of the inscription. If it says something else, let us know)

Finally, at a souvenir stand some distance away, the "liberty or death" flag of the 1876 rebellion, featuring a lion on a green background, sits alongside Bulgarian, EU and NATO flags. Symbols of traditional anti-Turkish nationalism, contemporary European trans-nationalism and a military alliance with Turkey, all for sale at prices so reasonable you could easily buy them all.

Nick Danforth, Georgetown University

More as a public service than an act of scholarship, we are publishing an excerpt on the basic principles of oil wrestling from Celal Bulut Arıbal's 1955 "Adalı Halil Pehlivan" (Hürriyet Gazetesi Neşriyatı, Yedigün Matbaası. Sadly time constraints prevent us from offering a proper biography of Adalı Halil, but suffice it to say he was a formidable wrestler with more than ample qualifications to advise beginners on the subject. With the oil wrestling community still in shock over the recent doping scandal, it seems an ideal time to look back on a purer, more heroic era in the sport's history. As this book relates, Halil's fame was not confined to the Kırkpınar Meydanı. He even traveled to America at one point, though he never even learned the names of all the people he wrestled and defeated there. In Chicago, though, "the Turkish lion" was nearly lynched by an angry mob when the force of his hold caused an opponent to pass out in the ring.

We also regret not being able to offer a translation of the text of the instructional manual accompanying Halil's biography, but we hope the pictures at least will be of some value to English speakers. After all, as the manual explains, "oil wrestlers match each other with knowledge and skill, not mere weight..."

To read the manual, continue after the break:

Chris Gratien, Georgetown University

click here for full-sized image

This map of the roads and railways of Iran from 1926 gives us a fantastic view of how cities and towns of the country were linked under the newly established Pahlavi state. However, it is not just the map but also the context within which is was found that draws our interest here. The map is part of an extended study by the League of Nations on the issue of opium production in Persia, which was both a major producer of poppies as well as a transit point for opium coming from the East. It was created at a time when the drug trade was becoming one of the major global "social issues (questions sociales)" addressed by the new organization. Of course, there is no guarantee that opium smugglers would stick to these routes, but the map gives some sense of the possible transit points for overland trade in the region.

Source: MAE, SDN/IM, No. 1640 - Opium en Perse

A historic map seems like a pretty inadequate gesture in light of everything the residents of Aleppo are going through, but it is if nothing else another reminder of the history and lives that are being destroyed there. This German city plan comes from a collection of European-made Middle Eastern maps that appears to have been owned by an Ottoman/Turkish army officer and potentially used during world war one. Several similar atlases, including collections of French maps of the Gallipoli and Russian maps of the Caucasus can be found at the IRCICA library. Below is a map from the Tuebingen Atlas of the Near & Middle East History, Geography & Cultural Anthropology showing the building-by-building history of Aleppo's old city, with the key underneath it. Wikipedia also has a remarkably detailed map of the city from 1958 here, this time made byt he US army corps of engineers.

Chris Gratien, Georgetown University

click here for full-sized image

In is no secret that the French administration in Syria and Lebanon during the Mandate period sought to categorize the population and divide it along various ethnic and sectarian lines, and while this process did to some extent have origins in the Ottoman period, no colonial power had mastered the art of dividing the races quite like the French. In many ways, the sectarian orders in these countries--to the extent that they survive today--are a holdover form this important interwar period. The efforts to classify and govern the population resulted in the production of various breakdowns of the region that give an impression of precision and intense attention to local detail that belies the imperfection of these representations that have the power to mislead. This approach to map-making fit with the France's creation of ethnically-defined political units such as the Alawite State of Lattakia. In short, reader beware, taking the date reflected in this map at face value or using it to talk about the present would be ill-advised and anachronistic.

This map drafted by the Services Speciaux of the French Mandate dates to approximately 1935 (apologies for any flaws in the photographs taken with a small camera, in low light, and of a rather large map). It represents regions of the French Mandate in terms of the communities that predominated in each area as well as offering some information about the different tribal groups in Greater Syria and their patterns of movement. The key below displays roughly how the French administration divided the population (the seemingly repetitive designation of Turcoman and Turkméne may be an error, since the latter symbol does not seem to appear anywhere on the map).

While there is apparently great effort to include even the smallest concentrations of one group located in a zone dominated by the other, the construction of these zones obscures the fact that in many of them a large minority and in some cases perhaps a majority of the inhabitants would have been outside the dominant group determined and represented by the French. One such example might be the apparent assertion that the port of Alexandretta was far and away a majority Christian city. Essentially, regions are represented in a radically simplified fashion.

Likewise, the identities on this map are externally constructed; there is no guarantee that they conform to local understanding of identity and indeed, an ethnic community such as Circassians could just as easily chosen to prioritize their Sunni identification when defining themselves vis a vis their neighbors, just as Christians and Alawites might choose to prioritize an ethnic identity, namely the Arab one that appears nowhere on this map. This absence is by far more conspicuous than all the precise divisions on the map, because alongside the Sunni identity shared by many of the "non-Arab" ethnic groups in the above table, some form of Arab identity was the one with most overlap across these categories. Indeed, it was one that was already forming the basis of a national identity in Syria and Lebanon and would dominate the post-mandate politics of the former in particular. In the hyper-nationalist climate of the 1930s, it is telling that the French system continued to distinguish these groups by religious categories and subcategories. We have Muslims in shades of red, Christians in blue, what seems to be a group of questionable Muslims in yellow, and Turks (including Kurds) in green, giving the sense of an overly fragmented population very much in accord with a divide and rule strategy.

This being said, there is also a case to be made that the continual usage of such categories in the administrative domain did encourage French subjects to identify within them. We see evidence of this in the emergent political order of Lebanon or the emergence of an Alawite identity in Syria, fostered by a French policy of recruiting and promoting Alawites within the army.

Just as these maps may give the false impression of simplicity in their breakdown, they were also not necessarily intended as perfect representations. Indeed, they were works in progress. In the case of this particular map, we happen to know from a letter (at right) requesting two minor revisions in the vicinity of Safita/Tripoli that amendments were continually made to such maps.

Here are some close-ups of different areas:

Mount Lebanon

Northern Syria

Jezireh/Eastern Syria

Source: MAE-Nantes, 1SL/1/V 2129

Mehter band performances might be the single worst aspect of the Ottoman legacy, along with that gross sticky candy they twirl around sticks. But it turns out Mehter bands can be surprisingly endearing when they consist of elementary school kids. These photos, from the Ibrahim Hakki Konyalı archive (#281), show students at the Üsküdar Hattad Ismail Hakki Ilkokulu, most likely at some point in the early sixties. For a more detailed discussion of the political context in which these performances emerged check out our post on Fetih Day, 1953.

More pictures after the break:

read the full article
here

In 1917, New York Tribune contributor Isaac Don Levine heralded the birth of a new nation. Its name was Palestine, but it was very much the nation of Israel that would come to be some three decades later, albeit with more audacious borders extending well into South Lebanon. It's no news for our readers that Israel used to be labelled Palestine on the world map, but the way Levine wrote about it is what catches our attention here. The Russian-born Levine saw a new phase on the horizon for the nearly 2,000-year-old "problem of the Jew," after the Russian Revolution seemed to promise emancipation for Europe's most persecuted minority.

Levine attributed the survival of Jewish identity over the centuries to rampant intolerance in Christian societies. "While the Hebrews were going into exile," he wrote, "a great power, arisen from their midst, was developing in humanity. It was to be the savior of the human race, the civilizer of a barbarous world. It was to organize life on new bases, justice and love. And as this power--Christianity--grew and expanded it exercised a conserving influence over the dispersed Judeans. But this influence was not woven of love and justice, but, on the other hand, of hatred and persecution." For an American audience, he offered an argument against such hatred, saying "The services of the Jews to humanity have been incalculable" and later adding in reference to Haym Solomon that a Jewish financiers had helped fund, among many great historical movements, the American revolution.

It's easy to see how his sympathies with the Russian revolution made sense in 1917 given the prominent role of Russian Jews in the Bolshevik Party, though he would eventually undergo a change of heart vis a vis the Soviet Union under Stalin to become one of the most staunchly anti-communist journalists in the US, eventually testifying against Alger Hiss. With the Allied Powers' sympathies towards the Zionist cause, he saw Christian antisemitism on the wane, though he indicated the situation was still bad for Polish Jews and did "not promise to be very bright in the near future," enough so that sufficient migrants would be found to settle the new state. As such, he advocated that the end of the First World War would bring the proper time for the establishment of a Jewish state.

Today's map, from Emily Neumeier, is sort of a companion to our earlier Istanbul Food Map, with lots more information for academics visiting or working in Istanbul this coming semester. Emily explains more down below:

View Istanbul for Academics in a larger map

"Now that the academic year is almost upon us, I wanted to highlight a mapping project of contemporary Istanbul for Ottoman historians, by Ottoman historians. The Google map "Istanbul for Academics" was specifically designed for scholars (whether they be grad students, professors, or independent academics) who are coming to work in Istanbul for the first time. Rather than focus on historical sites, this resource has information about all of the relevant research institutes, libraries, museums, as well as places to shop, have a coffee, etc. The result of a collective effort of contributions, primarily from graduate students residing in Istanbul, this initiative was inspired by a similar resource created by the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

The advantage of Google is that this map can be edited or amended by anyone who has access to the internet, so the content is constantly being updated as sites move, close, or open. Hopefully this site can be a resource to newcomers to Istanbul, so please pass it along to any of your colleagues or students who might get some use out of it. Also, it would be great if those of you who have a lot of experience in the city would be willing to contribute to the map by adding your own favorite places.

The map can be accessed with this link: http://goo.gl/maps/wBTD2. Basic instructions on how to contribute can be found on the site."

In case anyone came here by way of the Atlantic's article on Middle East borders, I wanted to offer a round-up of some of the best alternative maps of the region that have cropped up over the years. In addition to The New Arabia (next post, below) which differs from today's reality mostly in a fairly crucial bit of terminology, there is The New Assyria, as well as some interesting German and British colonial fantasies. There is also Lawrence of Arabia's recent map, as well as this somewhat less illustrious but quite popular one. Maps of Greater Israel, like those of its Balkan counterparts Greater Greece and Greater Albania, now appears more frequently on anti-Israel websites then on Zionist ones (or, in this case on a pro-Israel website drawing attention to the map's popularity on anti-Israel sites). Finally, one of the better recent maps on this subject, showing almost every conceivable version of Kurdistan that has been proposed over the years.

Afternoon Map is excited to announce its first publication / spinoff website, the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal Reader. Available as a shoddily made PDF as well, the Royal Asiatic Reader features highlights from mid-nineteenth century issues of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal that have been digitized by Google Books, with a particular emphasis on the esoteric, absurd, obscene, mystifying, offensive and poetic. I've always been fascinated by the articles that appeared in this Journal, not only because they make such entertaining reading (if only for the same kinds of people who like to look at old maps), but also because they seem to so perfectly illustrate the relationship between geographic knowledge and imperial power so well, if abstractly, documented in Orientalism. Here is just one excerpt, from Lieutenant Alexander 'Bokhara' Burnes:

And for anyone who came here by way of the Washington Post travel piece about Northern Greece, or is still interested in the drawing borders through multi-ethnic societies, I thought these four maps of the Prespa Lakes region offered a nice illustration of the rise and fall of the nation state. (Also, for anyone interested in hiking, here's a fairly simple map explaining some of the trails described in the Post article around Little Prespa in Greece.)

In the Ottoman period (lasting here from the 14th century to the 20th), the area around the Prespa Lakes was united under the administration of a single province. As seen in the mid 19th century commercial map on the top left, a series of roads connected all the cities around the lake (not pictured) and it took about 20 hours to get from Bitola/Monastir to Korca. The second map, on the top right, shows that, like most areas in the Balkans, and indeed around the world, the ethnic composition of this territory was diverse. This map, which describes itself with unusual candor as being from the Serb point of view, shows a mix of Serbs in dark green, Slavic Macedonians in light green, Albanians in orange, Greeks in blue, Turks in pink and Vlachs in purple. The region around the lakes was then divided following the Balkan wars between 1911 and 1913. This division was done by military force, with little regard to the identity or wishes of the inhabitants. Yet this ethnic map offers perhaps the best evidence of why a more "accurate" division would have been impossible - patterns of human habitation are simply too complicated. What is more, nationalist ambitions were too grandiose, as shown by the interlocking Greek (orange), Albanian (pink) and Serbian (blue) claims to lake in the map below.

As the map in the bottom left shows, Yugoslavia (now Macedonia) took the part to the North, Greece the part to the Southeast and Albania the part to the Southwest. For most of the 20th century these borders separated the residents along the lakes' edge, especially after the Greek Civil War made the region a Cold War faultline. Indeed, visitors to the region can still see the remains of military posts and guardhouses dotting the landscape, as well as deserted and destroyed villages emptied of their Slavic-speaking inhabitants during the civil war. Subsequently, the Greek government engaged in a conscious attempt to Hellenize the region, encouraging immigrants from other parts of the country (in many cases families who were still struggling to recover after their forced emigration from Turkey) to move to the region. More recently, the area has begun a limited reintegration under the aegis of the EU, as a transborder park. All three countries have designated their section of the lakes a park and engaged in some joint conservation efforts, promoting a newfound focus on the lakes as a coherent region, united by geology and ecology rather than divided by borders. That said, border crossings in the park remain closed, so visitors who want to see all three sides of the lake need to exit the park and travel on the larger roads between Florina, Bitola and Korce. Once in Macedonia, its easy to visit Lake Ohrid, which is connected to Prespa by an underground channel in the porous limestone (find out more on LakeNet!) and home to the flagship of the Macedonian navy.

The Washington Post apparently decided to title the print version of a travel article on Kavala and the Prespa Lakes "Hiking and History in Greece's Thracian Panhandle." They seem to have picked up Picking up on a reference in the text to Thrace as "Greece's Panhandle," and the fact that when looked at on a map, Kavala is clearly on the handle. The article had already generated a lot of predictably angry comments online from Greeks unhappy with the fact that the US government recognizes the country north of Greece as the "Republic of Macedonia" rather than Greece's preferred "F.Y.R.O.M." The article's title, though, will undoubtedly generate even greater outrage from readers correctly pointing out that, in a division going back to ancient times, both Kavala and Prespa are in the Greek province of Macedonia rather than the province of Thrace that begins just east of Kavala. (Most likely, as tends to be the case with these things, the intensity and vehemence of these readers' outrage will immediately alienate readers and distract from the fact they're actually correct). In any case there were already accusations that using "Northern Greece" rather than "Macedonia" to refer to the region I was traveling in represented some kind of anti-Greek conspiracy. The suspicion is a little odd, since no one has seriously denied Greece's right to the name Macedonia the way Greece denies others' right to it. Such suspicion also ignores the fact that for American readers, who really don't care about any of this, "Northern Greece" or "the Panhandle" are far more useful descriptions than "Macedonia." For the same reason, I usually tell people I meet abroad I'm from the Northeastern US, rather than the more specific but less helpful "New England." In the vain hope of preempting more criticism, let me repeat that the title was not mine and the article was intended to be as apolitical as possible. Which is why, incidentally, the article didn't get into any of the issues raised in the post below, which would just have made people angry for all sorts of other reasons.

This remarkable map takes all the prejudice of a century's worth of European racial and ethnographic maps, strips them of their biological pretense, and plots it out in the most candid terms imaginable. If you want to know how backwards your region is, just check the map. Spain, Canada and South Carolina appear to be just outside the zone of "very high" progress, while Missouri inexplicably makes the cut.

This map comes from "Mainsprings of Civilization: Heredity, Geography, Climate - A famous scientist argues that they determine a nation's history and shape its culture." The author, Ellsworth Huntington, also tried to identify the relationship between temperature and intelligence through a number of ingenious means. The first chart shows average library borrowing rates from selected cities mapped against daily temperature over the course of a year. The second shows civil service and other exam scores by month.

For a few more dumb things Huntington charted keep reading.

It seems like as a Middle East map blog we have to respond to the New York Times' map from this morning. As we have already pointed out, there are several much better alternative maps of the Middle East out there, and if borders are going to be redrawn our vote is obviously for the creation of a New Assyria. Several points:

1. Libya. This at least is kind of reasonable, if only because Libya very nearly was divided like this after World War Two. The French, British and Italians were each going to get a zone of influence, France in the southwest, Italy around Tripoli and Britain in the east by Egypt. Not surprisingly, Russia came out strongly against this division and insisted on a unified Libya, a plan that backfired when the US realized that by also supporting a unified Libya it could get the whole territory as a client state.

2. Syria and Iraq. First, for all the nonsense about "artificial" borders, there is a fairly substantial and entirely natural chunk of desert between Iraq and Syria, which is part of why these two areas have usually been thought of as separate geographic entities. More ironic, though, is the fact that for all the talk of sectarian identities, the recent historic link between these countries was always between the Iraqi Baath Party, whose successors will apparently end up in Sunnistan, and the Syrian Baathists, who will take control of Alawitestan.

3. Saudi Arabia. This is just silly. I guess they wanted to make sure they got to an even fourteen. Why not add in the Non-United Emirates for twenty-one total countries. And if the Palestinians got their independence, then the West Bank and Gaza split into independent states, but the West Bank settlers rejected the deal and declared their independence from Israel then you could have three more.
Anyways, there's been some talk recently that if only the British had listened to Lawrence of Arabia and created an independent Arab Kingdom things would have turned out much better. If nothing else, this map reminds us that Lawrence's protege, Sharif Hussein, lost the territory of Mecca and Medina to the Saudis almost immediately, and his dynasty didn't fair too well in Iraq either.

Nick Danforth, Georgetown University

This week is Ethnographic Map week on Afternoon Map, which is basically the map blog equivalent of shark week. We've posted some interesting European ethnographic maps of the Middle East before, but this week we have three posts with some more unusual examples of this genre. The first, today, shows the Ottomans using ethnographic maps as a tool of imperial rule in the Middle East. The second set of maps shows the Ottoman/Turkish use of ethnographic maps as propaganda to bolster territorial claims after the first world war. Finally, in the third set we try to offer a new perspective on some of the problems with this kind of cartography by showing an unusual set of ethnographic maps of my own home.

The map above is taken from the Filastin Risalesi, an official 1915 publication of the Ottoman army intended to be used as an officer’s manual for the Palestine region and discussed in some depth earlier by Zach Foster. The key reads as follows (from right to left):

Maronite - Green Diagonals
Durzi (Druze) - Red Diagonals
Yahudi (Jews) - Green Horizontals
Arab - Purple Verticals
Suriyeli (from Syria) - Red Horizontals
Rum (Greek / Ottoman Greek) - Purple Diamonds
Turk - Red Verticals
Turkmen yahut Turk (Turkmen or Turks) - Green Checks
Ismaililer (Ismaili Shiites) - Purple Checks
Mutawalli (More on this below) - Red and Green
Nusayri (More on this too) - Purple Diagonals

Durzi Koyu (Druze Village) - dotted line
Arap Koyu (Arab Village) - dotted line

There's all sorts of interesting stuff about this list, and a few things I still can't make sense of (that's where hopefully our readers will come in). The categories of Maronites, Druze, Rum and Yahudi are all pretty straightforward, and these groups are marked as being pretty much where we might expect them to be. Turks stand out mainly because of where they aren't shown, namely in Cyprus or Hatay; When subsequent conflicts arose over both these regions, the Turkish government was quick to emphasize the presence of ethnic Turks living in them. In the partial distinction between Turk and Turkmen, the map follows a relatively common-place 19th century practice of treating nomadic and sedentary peoples as separate. Like the distinction between the settled Suriyeli and the nomadic Arab, this divide would eventually disappear as Arab and Turkish nationalisms emphasized linguistic similarities over lifestyle differences. In the case of the Turkmen, this process has already begun, with the mapmakers emphasizing the group's underlying Turkishness. Suriyeli, meaning those from the region of Syria, stands out as a term I've never seen used like this before, It seemingly reflects an era after the rise of Turkish nationalism but before the rise of Arab nationalism, where the settled inhabitants of the Levant (described as Ottomans in some European maps from the 19th century) where recognized as somehow non-Turkish but still not identified with the nomadic Arabs who frequently show up on maps from the period as Bedouin. Finally, perhaps the strangest thing is the use of Nusayri and Mutawalli. Mutawallis, which today is used to refer to Shiites more generally, show up on this map as located around the city of Antakya, in an area inhabited, then and now, by people who would today be called Alawites. Nusayris, a term that today is usually used to refer to Alawites, appear both in the area between Iskenderun and Adana and south of the Maronites and Druze in the Lebanese mountains. Ismailis are nowhere to be seen. If anyone has any theories about what exactly is going on here I'd be curious to hear it (likewise, I'm at a loss for what the dotted lines showing Arab and Druze villages are all about).

In any case the fact that Ottomans were making their own ethnographic maps of the territories they ruled should be particularly exciting for that breed of Ottoman historian who loves denouncing all forms of modernization as devious European imperialist plots, then pointing out with great pride that the Ottomans were modernizing their state just like Europeans. It's what Chris Gratien once called "wanting to have your modernity and eat it too." So yes, the Ottoman state was using ethnographic maps to bolster their own imperial rule in the Middle East, at a time when ethnic demographics had come to be seen as a crucial part of the strategic terrain. The failure of this effort, a few short years after the making of this map, set the stage for the maps in our next post...

The second installment of our three-part ethnographic map week shows the creation and deployment of these maps as international propaganda in the period right after the first world war. These images come from a large set of maps made using 1917 census data purporting to show the ethnic composition of the territory that the Ottoman Empire still hoped to hold on to after World War One. While yesterday's map was written in Ottoman Turkish, this map is written in French, suggesting that it was intended for an international audience, suitable to serve as a visual aid at a European peace conference. (If anyone knows more about M. Salih, who made this particular set of maps, I'd be curious to know. They appeared in the IRCICA library, which has an amazing maps but little information about the source of their collection). Woodrow Wilson's emphasis on national self-determination gave many people - members of ethnic minorities but also in many cases leaders of non-Western states like Turkey - hope that any post-war settlement would recognize their political and territorial aspirations. These hopes were based both on an optimistic assessment of the role Wilson's Fourteen Points would play in peace negotiations as well as generally optimistic demographic readings of the region inhabited by members of a particular nation. In this context, the production of maps like these were part of the rhetorical arsenal of every state and minority group aspiring to statehood in the immediate post-war era. Thus included in these sets of maps are the regions around Aleppo/Halep and Mosul, showing the supposed ethnographic basis of Ottoman claims to the region at the end of the war.

Among other things that stand out is the categories into which the mapmakers have chosen to divide people. Christians were divided up into as many confessional groups as possible, in contrast to the new national identity emerging among some of these populations themselves. Yet while the map identifies Arabs as a distinct ethnic group, the dominant population appears as "Elements musulmans (hors l'element arabe)" or Muslim Elements (except for Arabs). This cleverly allows the map to combine Kurds and Turks into a single majority without quite having to claim the Kurds were Turks. There is also, seen most clearly in the maps below, an attempt to minimize the amount of territory shown as non-Turkish. Using a trick well-established among makers of these sorts of maps, the cartographer has shown predominantly Greek cities and towns as blue but colored the sparsely inhabited territory between towns pink by default. Greek communities were, more frequently urban-dwelling, but not to anywhere near the extent shown by this map, which seems to suggest that the soil itself was Turkish/Muslim. This is even more striking in the maps of Eastern Anatolia, where territory was assumed to be Muslim unless in the absence of a clear Christian population.

Below, another set of maps by M. Salih from the same time:

These offer another presentation of Anatolia's seemingly overwhelming Muslim majority, complete with detailed statistical tables. What stands out about these, apparently made with 1914 census data instead of 1917 data, is that in addition to again dividing the terms in the state's favor (Muslims versus the ethnically divided Armenians and Greeks) they also provide a breakdown by village, the vast majority of which have been identified as either Muslim or mixed Muslim and Christian.

These maps, created by Blake Gumprecht, offer a nice perspective on the ethnographic maps we've been looking at for the past week. On one hand, they reveal some undeniably fascinating dynamics, as anyone else who grew up in a French Canadian part of New England knows. At the same time, if you arrived in the Northeastern United States thinking that these maps actually revealed the region's defining political dynamics you would be profoundly misled. It's also interesting to see how the existence of different kinds of ethnographic data can lead to remarkably different looking maps. The one to the left was based on 2000 census data that treated "French," "French-Canadian," and "Canadian" as different groups, and thus shows "English" as a majority in areas that then become French-Canadian on the right when these three categories are collapsed together. Finally, the picture on the left is "Un Yankee" as shown in a late 19th century French geography book. After years of seeing ethnographic sketches labelled "The Albanian" or "A Typical Balooch," it's nice to finally see someone who looks like me.

Istanbul Food Map

Safely Evacuating Ottoman Era Structures

Some beautiful 1980s maps from Bulgaria

Commemorating Batak

The Principles of Oil Wrestling with Adalı Halil Pehlivan

Opium Roads of Iran

Aleppo

Mapping Minorities in Syria

Mini Mehter

The Birth of New Nations: Palestine

Istanbul for Academics

Alternative Visions of the Middle East

Royal Asiatic Reader

Prespa Lakes

Greece's Panhandle

General Progress

All the States that Fit to Print

Ottoman Ethnographic Map of the Middle East

Ethnographic Maps as Propaganda

Ethnic Maps of New England