Post #12 shows a map identifying three core areas of Europe with transition zones in between. This map here has a different approach to European cultural diversity.
On the one hand, it posits a contiguous cultural core - roughly correspondent, coincidentally with Charlemagne’s empire (plus a swathe of England and Scandinavia) - and with the original European Community (the three Benelux countries, West Germany, France and Italy).
On the other hand, it describes some parts of Europe as less ‘European’ than this core by quoting several writers, artists and thinkers (from the ‘core’, obviously):
Ireland: “That savage nation” (Edmund Spenser)
Brittany: “Wild and primitive” (Paul Gauguin); “Frankly pagan” (J. Cameron)
Spain: “Africa begins at the Pyrennees” (Alexandre Dumas); “Outside the southern door of Europe proper” (James Michener)
Corsica: “Still savages” (Alexandre Dumas)
Sardinia: “Rejected European civilisation” (P. Nichols)
Sicily: “Stagnant and backward” (L. Barzini)
Mezzogiorno (southern Italy): (L. Barzini)
Albania: “Savage character” (Lord Byron)
Bulgaria: “A mongrel east” (A. Symons)
Greece: “All the Turkish vices” (Lord Byron)
Istanbul: “Damn her, the whore! Sleeping with the Turks” (A. Kazantzakis)
Cyprus: “East in west and west in east” (P. Geddes)
Ukraine: “A decided Oriental kink in their brains” (British Foreign Office)
Poland: “Advanced outpost of Western civilisation” (Joseph Conrad)
Russia: “Scratch a Russian and you will wound a Tartar” (Napoleon)
Finland: “Fierce and uncivilised” (M. Pitts)
Sadly, as I’ve downloaded this map a long time ago and (again) didn’t make a note of the origin, I can’t say much about the context. However, the use of highlighter seems to indicate that it was made in a school environment…
The ‘present core’ of Europe (”Where defining traits are strongest”) is highlighted in red. Green is used to highlight some boundaries of these traits - and it all seems to boil down to the limits of Christianity versus Islam and paganism (Arab rule in Spain, Turkish rule in the Balkans, Christianity in the north about 1030, Christianity in the south at present) - making the point that ‘European’ actually is synonymous with ‘Christian’. Which is a controversial point - recall the debate about the EU Constitution not mentioning Christianity as a ‘core European trait’.
Strange Maps
Strange Maps is a weblog devoted to, well, strange maps. Some of them are absolutely wonderful. The map below shows someone concept of the “European Core”, the real Europe within continent of Europe. Glad to see the Irish still beyond the p…
Trackback by Limbicnutrition Weblog — November 7, 2006 @
That map reminded me of this one–
http://www.georgeglazer.com/maps/europe/comicmapeurope.html
Comment by Helen — November 9, 2006 @
This map is from the late Dr. Terry Jordan’s Geography of Europe course at the University of Texas at Austin (as is the map of North-South divides in Europe that appears above). The map appears in his textbook, co-authored with Bella Bychkova-Jordan (The European Culture Area: A Systematic Geography, 4th ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). I was Dr. Jordan’s teaching assistant, so I am confident this highlighted map was from his personal collection of classroom transparencies.
Comment by Joy — November 9, 2006 @
I just found this blog and couldn’t resist looking at about 20 of them, it’s a really cool concept.
There is at least one huge glaring error on this map, though: isn’t Arabic an Indo-European language?
Comment by Dave On Fire — January 22, 2007 @
@ Dave On Fire:
Thanks, I hope you enjoy the rest too! As for Arabic: it’s a Semitic language, and thus quite far removed from the Indo-European languages.
Comment by strangemaps — January 22, 2007 @
I was under the impression that the semitic languages were a subset of the Indo-European ones. Perhaps I’m getting confused by the alphabets, which are definitely related.
Comment by Dave On Fire — January 23, 2007 @
the semitic languages are a sub-set of the afro-semitic family, (which has its origins in the great rift valley in east africa). the northern semitic languages are strongly influenced by the indo-aryan languages.
Comment by ninebucks — June 17, 2007 @
The Semitic word for ‘7′ seems to have been borrowed from IE.
Comment by Anton Sherwood — September 12, 2007 @
That is actually a very interesting and very useful map. I was recently listening to a Berkeley podcast on european history, and i spent practically the entire duration trying to work out, just what exactly the professor thought ‘europe’ was.. and interestingly enough, her idea of europe mirrors this. As muslim rule waxed and waned over europe, her interests in what occurred waxed and waned too.
The second interesting thing to note is that it shows how highly suitable Brussels is to be the EU capital, lying as it does, smack bang in the core zone.
and the final third thing, the very core of europe is actually also the most prosperous area.. northern italy, the benelux, south east england, sw germany its all in the map
Comment by Abu Hussain — July 19, 2008 @
[...] Spain, now a fully integrated member of the European Union, once was considered so alien to the rest of Europe that Alexandre Dumas is known to have remarked that “Africa begins at the Pyrennees” (see #22). [...]
Pingback by 300 - The Reign in Spain (1850) « Strange Maps — July 22, 2008 @
Re #9 about Brussels, the dead center of the “core” appears to be near Strasbourg, the other main seat of the EU.
Comment by Dave — July 22, 2008 @
[...] that Alexandre Dumas is known to have remarked that “Africa begins at the Pyrennees” (see #22). The Pyrennees are a prime example of how geography is destiny. This mountain chain that so neatly [...]
Pingback by 300 - The Reign in Spain (1850) | geo2web.com — July 22, 2008 @
“quoting several writers, artists and thinkers (from the ‘core’, obviously)”
Joseph Conrad was actually born and raised in Poland.
Comment by Chris — July 23, 2008 @
I find it strange that this map did not get you 50 angry answers, as those posts about some Middle Eastern maps did. I would have thought that nobody knows anything about the Middle East.
I also think that Europe = Christian is pretty obvious, though I don’t know anything about geography and ever so little about history, but in all the stories and the pictures of the past there are these churches and those saints, and also in the pictures of the villages everywhere.
This is a very great blog.
Comment by cantueso — July 26, 2008 @
Saramago. Do you know that name? A Portuguese author and known as a fierce communist and a wonderful story teller. There is one “La balsa de piedra”= the stone raft, which is about a little crack that one day opened at the Pyrenees between Europe and Spain, and when they saw the crack, they called in the engineers to fix it, but it got wider really fast, and TV people came to film the disaster, because it became known that Spain was going to break loose! And so it did! Though the engineers had tried to fasten it to the contionent with big steel clamps! The peninsula came off and started to float out into the wide ocean.
It is a great story.
That is the first 20 pages. After that the story gets lost in philosophical monologues.
Comment by cantueso — July 26, 2008 @
While I respect Barzini’s commentary, it seems the mapmaker’s lines are a bit high on the leg to accommodate. Leaving Rome outside of Europe’s Core (Treaty of Rome) is preposterous. Simply, without her there would be no Europe to map.
Comment by Ray — July 27, 2008 @
What about other countries ? No quot on Lithuania, Latvia etc… Just wondering.
http://www.EuropeWord.com
Comment by robert224466 — September 4, 2008 @