POST-WAR MAP

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19835, 26 June 1934, Page 10

POST-WAR MAP

ALTERATIONS STILL BEING MADE POLITICS AND NAME PLATES Geography manages to remain exciting. Unlike theories of outer space, which may not be in December what they were in May, changes in mundane facts have to be kept up with. To mail n letter, ship a cargo or make a journey it is well 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 post-war map alterations that still continue. Post-war Vagaries. 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 epocios and therefore the burden on students doubles with each veer or shift. Only a day or so later the Russians substituted Gorkigrad for the ancient Nijni-Novgorod. Eight centuries of association of the name with trade and barter and hipbuilding—place of the oldest of fairs, a city that had looked upon the Golden Horde—w’as transformed overnight by the revolution to association with a modem master of letters, celebrating art rather than commence. Exigencies of war had already begun to suppress reminders of Germanic influence under the Czars, but got only as far as to supersede St. Petersburg with Petrograd. Since the transition from autocracy to dictatorship of the proletariat, Russia has given new designations to all towns whose names smacked of Czarism. Petrograd now memorialises the 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 Czar 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. Postal Puzzles. These are among the consequences of revolt, which always bear hard upon the oncoming generation. Since America, with her principle of self-determin-ation, had a hand in the rearrangement of frontiers and the appearance of republics in place of monarchies, w T e have no general reason for complaint. One name change perhaps is open to colloquial objection. The Czechs, whom we admired, have taken Pilsen and made it into Pizen. Atlases generally record the Japanese designations of Chosen, Keijo and Dairen, though cable and postal directories still have to translate them into Kora, Seoul and Dalny. So far the sobriquet of Manchukuo, imposed upon ancient Manchuria, has gone unrecognised by geographers, post offices, Chancellors or the League of Nations. Letters naw addressed to Constantinople, might as well be addressed to Byzantium—they will not be delivered unless properly "crossed” Istanbul, Mustapha Kemal's device for indicating that Turkey has gone native. This is one of the few conversions of place names around the Mediterranean that preserve the antique grace. Invasions, conquests, insurrections, revolutions have played havoc with the poetic.