CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

Evening Star, Issue 21784, 28 July 1934, Page 6

CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

EUROPE AND ASIA Geography manages to remain Oxciting. Unlike theories of outer space, which' may not be in December. What they \vere in May, cliahges in mundane facts have to ho; kept up with. To nlail;a letter, shim a cargo, or'-make a journey it .is, well i to know, what the natives call the destination. ; 'But- the world is always being explored, .divided, and tugged about, and. its parts named and renamed, and since : 1914 persons schooled in the previous generation have had to unlearn .and learn a great deal about boundaries and ~ nomenclature. To-day’s teachers and pupils fare worse. They find themselves involved in postwar map alterations that still continue. Hardly had they,' for instance, become aware that Hedjaz was a kingdom,set up in 1916 and the Nejd an indefinite region with a Wahabi ruler, than Ibn Saud decreed that his new country composed of the two must be henceforth known as the Arabian Saudian Kingdom. Names mark epochs, and therefore the burden on students doubles with each veer or shift. Only a tiny or so later the Russians substituted Gorkigrad for the ancient NijniNovgorpd. Eight centuries of association of the name with. trade and barter and shipbuilding—place of the. oldest of fairs, a city that had looked upon the Golden Horde—was transformed overnight by the revolution to association with a modern master of letters, celebrating art rather than commerce.

Exigencies of war had already begun to suppress reminders of Germanic influence under the Tsars, but got only as far as to supersede St. Petersburg with Petrograd. Since the transition from autocracy to dictatorship of tho proletariat Russia has given new designations to all towns whose names smacked; of Tsarism. Petrograd now memoralises tho, founder of Sovietism

as Leningrad. Czaritzin, on the Volga, with less violence to ancient history, has become Stalingrad, for the'present chief of State. In Siberia Ekaterinburg, so called for Catherine the Great, where the Tsai Nicholas and the Imperial Family were put to death, is now mapped as Sverdlovsk. Simbirsk, as Ulyanovsk, embodies the memory of Lenin’s family name.

Atlases generally record the Japanese designations of Chosen, Keijo, and Dairen, though cable and postal directories still have to,translate^ them into Korea, Seoul, and .Dalny. _ So far the sobriquet of Mancliukuo, imposed upon ancient Manchuria, has gdue unrecognised- by geographers, post offices, Chancellors,'or the League of Nations. Letters now addressed to Constantinople might as well he addressed Byantinirt:—they will not ho delivered unless properly “ crossed ’’ Istanbul, Mustapha Komars device for indicating that Turkey has gone native. Ibis is one of the few conversions of place names arouno the Mediterranean that preserve the antique grace.