Suomi-Neito is a distant, but weirdly parallel echo of ‘Paula’, the personification of Brazil’s Sao Paulo state (discussed in #471). Female like most other anthropomorphic representations of geographic entities (1), this Finnish Maiden shares with Paula the extra distinction of not only symbolising her nation, but also literally coinciding with its geographic shape.
The Finnish Maiden reminds me of the lament by a Finnish friend, a bachelor recently returned to his home country after years of working abroad: “All the women in Helsinki look identical. It feels like you’re going out with the same woman over and over again.” A luxury problem perhaps, as that same woman probably looks a lot like the Finnish Maiden: a tall, blonde, blue-eyed woman in her mid-twenties (braided hair, bare feet and folkloristic costume in the national blue-white colours are optional).
Although eternally young, the Finnish Maiden is older than the Finnish nation. She was devised to represent the longed-for national independence in the 19th century, when Finland was still a Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire. The shape of that Grand Duchy inspired the conceit of seeing her as the country itself, with both arms raised. Eastern territories lost by Finland tothe Soviet Union in 1944 meant the Maiden, facing the viewer, also lost her raised left arm (2).
Nowadays, Suomi-Neito is usually presented as follows: Finland’s westward protrusion into the Gulf of Bothnia is the Maiden’s wind-blown skirt, the narrower middle of the country her small waist, the northernmost bulge of Lapland her head and the narrow region branching out towards the northwest between Sweden and Norway her waving right arm. The identification of this region with its anthromorph equivalent is such that the area, officially the commune of Enontekiö, is commonly referred to as Käsivarsi (‘The Arm’).
Many thanks to Kevin Axe for sending in this map, found here on Come to Finland, a website (and a book) devoted to the art of Finnish tourist posters. The map and the maiden were produced in 1948 by Finnish artist Olavi Vepsäläinen (1927–1993).
1 see also Marianne (France), Mother Russia, and a host of Roman-sounding ladies such as Germania, Hibernia, Polonia, Helvetia and Britannia; male counterparts include Johnny Canuck (Canada), Deutscher Michel (Germany), Uncle Sam, John Bull and Juan de la Cruz (Philippines).
2 the area known as Petsamo in Finnish, now the Pechengski District in Russia, which while in Finnish possession granted Finland access to the Barents Sea, at the same time denying the Soviet Union a common border with Norway. The situation was reversed when the area was ceded to the Soviet Union after Finland’s defeat in the Continuation War (1941-1944), together with other areas further south, most notably a large part of Karelia in Finland’s southeast. This Wikimedia Commons map shows the location of Petsamo (in yellow), plus a small area pre-ceded by Finland to the Soviets in 1940 (in green) and another area sold by the Finnish to the Soviet Union in 1947 (in red). Petsamo, incidentally, is the birthplace of an actress who popularised an esthetic diametrically opposed to the wholesome, blonde, outdoorsy one symbolised by the Finnish Maiden: Maila Nurmi (1922-2008), better known as the raven-haired, black-clad pre-goth Vampira.
Apart from being a past sponsor of international terrorism and the West’s new best friend in North Africa, Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi is also a crackpot dictator with the bizarrest imagination1 this side—heck, any side—of Pyongyang. On foreign trips, the Guide of the Libyan Revolution, as he is called, habitually pitches a bedouin tent on the front lawn of a luxury hotel, sometimes even flying in camel mares for their fresh milk. But it’s doubtful whether Africa’s most colourful colonel will be pitching his tent on Swiss soil anytime soon.
Since July 2008, Gadaffi has been engaged in an ever escalating war of words with Switzerland. The arrest by Genevan police of Gadaffi’s son Hannibal and his wife for assaulting their housekeeping staff was a rather trivial matter in the grander scheme of international affairs. But Gadaffi decided to huff, and puff, and hit back with punitive economic measures against the Helvetians, not least the withdrawal of $5 billion from his Swiss bank accounts and the taking hostage of a few Swiss entrepreneurs on business in Libya.
Gadaffi cranked the level of unpleasantness up to 11 by advocating the partition of Switzerland along linguistic lines among its French, German and Italian neighbours2; stating that he would wipe the alpine confederation off the map even more thoroughly, if he only had the Bomb; and calling for an all-out jihad against Switzerland3.
How Gadaffi’s proposal for the dismemberment of Switzerland might work out. Map taken here from Wikipedia.
Not easily intimidated, the Swiss of late seem determined to grind Gadaffi’s gears, by advocating expansion rather than extinction for their Helvetic Confederation. Three separate, and from the Tent-dweller-in-Chief’s perspective rather irksome proposals have come to the attention of Strange Maps.
The first would correct the historic injustice of Savoy’s annexation by France. The Savoy4 was absorbed by France in 1860 after a rigged plebiscite returned an improbable 99.8% in favour of annexation. Not an option on the ballot paper: regaining independence or joining Switzerland. This first proposal would also see Franche-Comté5 transferring to the Swiss side. According to a September 2008 article on the Savoyard website RégionLéman.com, the French regionalist groups Savoie Europe Liberté and Mouvement Franche-Comté signed an agreement to conduct resolute and audacious actions against the centralist French state. The ultimate goal—libération—apparently is compatible with encantonment in Switzerland. It does seem compatible with Swiss wishes: according to an opinion poll, almost 44% of all Swiss already look favourably on annexing said territories, a percentage increasing to just under 56% when confined to la Suisse romande (French-speaking Switzerland).
This map shows Switzerland enlarged with French Savoy (to the south of Geneva) and the Franche-Comté (to the north of Geneva). Map taken here from the aforementioned Région Léman Website.
The second proposal, launched as recently as 12 June 2010, taps into regionalist sentiments on the other side of the French-Italian border, and proposes an Helvetic-Insubrian Confederation. Named after the Celtic Insubres, who dwelled in this pre-alpine area and reputedly founded Milan in 600 BC, the term Insubria formerly was used to mean Lombardy, or the Duchy of Milan. In recent decades, it has regained currency as the name for a Swiss-Italian Euroregion (since 1995)6, for local cultural associations, educational institutions, etcetera. Almost inevitably, the reawakening of an Insubrian identity snowballed into calls for political autonomy–on both sides of the Swiss border–among others by the group Domà Nunch7. The eco-nationalists (who commemorate the 1976 Seveso ecodisaster yearly as a kind of national day) habitually promote the idea of an Insubrian Confederation, modelled on the Swiss one to the north. The proposal of an Helvetic-Insubrian Confederation apparently was a response to expansionist noises from across the Swiss border8. Eager eco-nationalists started calculating the economic viability of such a Confederation, which would unite Insubrians on both sides of the border (and, incidentally, with a lot of non-Insubrians in Switzerland). The expanded Confederation would have over 15.5 million inhabitants, cover 53,700 km2 and would have a GDP of €600,000 million (almost $775.000 million), making it the 9th economy in Europe.
A map of ‘La Confederazione Elvetico-Insubre’, emblazoned with the Insubric word for “Let’s Unite”, and with the Insubrian insignia, which contains, horribly, a child-eating snake. These guys need a good PR agency. Map taken here from the Domà Nunch Website.
Although it doesn’t take in all the areas covered by the first and second proposal, the third plan is the most ambitious one. Launched in June of 2010 by the right-wing populist Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), it would expand Switzerland into all its neighbours–except tiny Liechtenstein, which would be enclaved inside a truly Greater Switzerland. “We’re always discussing Switzerland joining the EU, never the other way around,” said SVP-president Toni Brunner, approving of to the proposal by one of his party-members. SVP-parliamentarian Dominique Baettig said he would neighbouring regions that “suffered under their national and the European political classes” to join the Swiss “democracy with a human face.” Ideally, he would like to see Switzerland snatch the Land Vorarlberg from Austria; the province Aosta, Varese, Como and Bolzano (‘Bosen’ in German) from Italy; the départments Jura, Ain, Savoie and Haute-Savoie and the région of Alsace (‘Elsass’ in German) from France. The single biggest chunk would be the German Bundesland of Baden-Württemberg, bringing in almost 11 million new Swiss citizens. If all went according to the Mr Baettig’s plan, the new, Greater Switzerland would count around 25 million inhabitants and would be a mid-sized European power to be reckoned with… at least by the Libyans.
The Greatest of the Greater Switzerlands, enclaving poor old Liechtenstein (between Vorarlberg and Switzerland’s former eastern border). Map taken here from the Swiss Tagesanzeiger newspaper.
Many thanks to Christophe Schmutz, Matteo Colaone and Jörg Raddatz for sending in these maps.
1 Bizarrery too fantastic to pass up, but too extensive to list here. We recommend you Google/Bing/Yahoo it.
2 At a recent G8 summit, Mr Gadaffi argued that Switzerland “is a world mafia and not a state [...] It is formed of an Italian part that should return to Italy, a German part that should return to Germany and a French part that should return to France.” Gadaffi overlooked the speakers of Rumantsch, Switzerland’s fourth official language (admittedly spoken by less than 1% of its almost 8 million inhabitants). If in the Gadaffi Doctrine language areas should become national borders, the Rumantsch should be granted their own little alpine republic (on the partition map above, the Rumantsch-speaking area in the country’s south-east is reallocated to Germany).
3 in February 2010, following the Swiss plebiscite that banned minarets.
4 actually only part of the Savoy; other parts of the historic region are at present Italian territory.
5 Franche-Comté also has a tradition of independent-mindedness. The name of the region refers to the ‘Free County’ of Burgundy, not to be confused with the Duchy of Burgundy.
6 For earlier treatments of Euroregions, see Strange Maps #86 and #163.
7 which means something like ‘Only Us’. Which sounds remarkably like the English translation of the Irish Sinn Fèin.
8 those noises were in fact Mr Baettig’s proposal–see last map–although they obviously were interpreted quite differently by the Insubrians.
Sao Paulo is the only one of Brazil’s 26 states to include a map of the entire country on its flag; the Paulista state motto exhorts its citizens to Let great things be done for Brazil. And yet, Sao Paulo State historically harboured a more persistent regionalist, and even separatist sentiment than any other Brazilian state.
Sao Paulo is the richest, most populous state of the Brazilian federation. It is also the West’s most populous sub-national entity (*). At over 42 million inhabitants, Sao Paulo would rank 31st out of the world’s 223 independent countries, just behind Tanzania and right in front of Argentina. It would be the fifth most populous nation of the Americas (after the US, what would be left of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia). According to some reckonings (**), the eponymous state capital with its 11 million inhabitants is the biggest city in the Western world.
Population size isn’t the only thing that matters, though. Even back in 1842, when still very sparsely populated, Sao Paulo demonstrated the go-it-alone streak in its character by rebelling against the Emperor. The Paulistas expressed this streak politically by their adherence to the PRP (Partido Republicano Paulista), founded in 1873 to advocate the overthrow of the Empire in favour of a republican system.
When the republic of Brazil was eventually proclaimed in 1889, the PRP got its hands firmly glued to the levers of Brazil-wide power, which it shared with the PRM, from neighbouring Minas Gerais state. The arrangement saw the PRP and the PRM divvy up the presidency and political influence in the capital Rio de Janeiro. It was a cohabitation known as cafe com leite (‘coffee with milk’), as Sao Paulo’s economy was based on the former, Minas Gerais’ on the latter commodity.
This map celebrates Sao Paulo’s separateness from the rest of Brazil by portraying it anthropomorphically. The unnamed lady – let’s call her Paula – thus serves as Sao Paulo’s very own version of France’s Marianne or the UK’s Britannia: a symbolic female as allegory of the state’s unique history, territorial homogeneity and separate future. One could say it does so better than the French or British figureheads, as ‘Paula’ actually coincides with the borders of her state.
The emblematic female wears the state flag in her hair, but the slogan is not the one referred to earlier. It reads Everything for Sao Paulo. It would be interesting to learn how the PRP managed to balance the inherent separatism of its regionalist agenda with the demands – and the benefits – of its share in federal governance. Or maybe it didn’t, in the long run. For the PRP/PRM cohabitational system collapsed in the early 1930s, with the power-grab of Getulio Vargas, who abolished both parties and went on to establish a populist, authoritarian Estado Novo. The more regionally inclined elements in Sao Paulo State opposed this evolution. Incipient rebellion turned to inchoative secession in 1932, but the so-called Paulista War was crushed by federal troops in a few months’ time.
Many thanks to Vinicius Morello – definitely Brazilian and possibly Paulistano – for sending in this map.
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(*) and not the world’s, as reported earlier (see comments). And only if one excludes England, the grounds for which are somewhat debatable (i.e. England’s historic and demographic importance for the UK is such that it is more than a mere ‘sub-nation’).
(**) the ones that exclude the suburbs.
Between 1934 and 1959, The Three Stooges produced 190 short films for Columbia Pictures. While all exhibited the Stooges’ trademark slapstick humour, gaining them a cult following, only one of the zany troupe’s shorts is of interest to the admittedly rather narrow field of curious cartography.
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Malice in the Palace (1949) is set in a fictionalised, funnified Middle East, where Moe, Shemp and Larry run the Cafe Casbah Bah. Two of their customers, Gin-A Rummy and Hassan ben Sober, are plotting to steal a giant diamond from the tomb of Rootentooten. However, when they discover the diamond is already in the possession of the Emir of Schmow, they start yammering and are kicked out of the Cafe. The Stooges then decide to retrieve the diamond themselves, using a map left behind by the unsuccessful plotters.
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MOE to SHEMP and LARRY: “Now, here, study this map closely!”
(Moe is now showing Shemp and Larry the route they are going to take to get to the castle as Moe is using a knife to lay out their travel route.)
MOE to SHEMP and LARRY: “We start here at Jerkola, down the Insane River, over the Giva Dam, through Pushover, across Shmowland, to the stronghold of Shmow.”
The map, shown briefly in the film, is of a continentful of countries with strange names and odd shapes, clearly designed to look and sound ‘foreign’. What does this ‘Map of Starvania’, designed merely for the purpose of unsophisticated comedy, unconsciously reveal of mid-20th-century America’s attitudes towards the exotic, the un-American?
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Firstly, the name: Starvania. It continues the tradition of using vaguely latinate toponyms as shorthand for exotism. Previous examples include Ruritania, others are Syldavia and Borduria (all mentioned in #461). Intriguingly, by referring to ‘starvation’, this toponym may demonstrate a mental equation made by Americans between distance from their Land of Plenty and the incidence of famine (the greater the former, the likelier the latter). Considering that the Second World War had only recently ended, this might have indeed been a prevalent attitude in the US at the time.
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Secondly, the shapes: The Great Mitten floating around to the left of the main continent is of course a reference to Michigan’s lower peninsula (see also #454). Maybe not foreign, but at least a funny shape. The main continent is a profile facing left, attached to the bottom is an Italy-shaped boot called Hot Foot. Italy being the Old Country of so many Americans must have figured prominently in any brain-storming session on ‘foreignness’.
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Some of the foreign-looking names actually sound quite familiar; these are wordplays such as Isle Asker (“I’ll ask her”), Rubid-Din (“rub it in”), Cant Sea (“can’t see”) and the aforementioned Giva Dam (“give a damn”). Other plays on words, sounding less foreign, are Bay of Window (“bay window”), Corkscrew Strai(gh)ts (a corkscrew being the opposite of straight), and Hot Sea and Tot Sea (“hotsie totsie”, for something or someone pretty).
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Other names are extended riffs on actual foreign toponyms: I-ran, He-ran, She-ran, They-ran and Also-ran. Another set consists of Egypt, You-gypt and We-gypt (on the left, partly outside this image). The first set works a bit better than the second one, but both reflect an unfamiliarity with these foreign placenames.
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A further set of names reflect directly negative references, sometimes with the flavour of contemporary street vernacular: the Vulgar River (just north of Double-Crossea, on the right), the Insane River (running through Staywayoff, at the centre of the map), Jerkola, Slap-Happia, Hangover, Pushover.
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Least but not last, there are a few names that seem to reflect nothing much more than map-filling noise: Woo-Woo and Oomphola. Or the rudimentariness of these names might be understood to reflect on the lack of sophistication of the places they denote.
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A clever play on words is Mikey Finlen, referring both to Finland and to a ‘Mickey Finn’ – slang for a drink spiked to incapactiate its imbiber (hence “to slip a mickey”). Less clever: Lake of Lamb (“Leg of Lamb”, supposedly). Other names are self-explanatory, inexplainable or unreadable due to low image quality.
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Many thanks to William Angiolillo for sending in this map.
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