Saturday, March 3, 2007

A European Geography Tangent

I'm reading a book about a priest who helped the starving peoples of Europe after World War II. I got a little distracted with the numerous place names I was unfamiliar with. Here's the list from just one page, plus a few that came up in my digging through an atlas to find them. See if you can find where these are...

Bukowina (or Bucovina)
Bessarabia
Bachka (I have to admit I haven't found this one yet)\
Silesia
Ermland (haven't found this one either)
Pomerania
Sudetenland
Potsdam
Galicia
Carpathian Mountains

Have fun!

3 comments:

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

Bukowina and Bessarabia are both in Roumania. Ermland is the part of former East Prussia that remained Catholic, even after most of it went Protestant. After WW2 East Prussia was renamed Kaliningrad enclave. It was (is) occupied by the then Soviet Union, Germans/Prussians have been driven out and replaced with Russians. You will probably not find old names on new maps. Königsberg has become Kaliningrad, but I think Ermland is very much more rural than that.

There are two Galicias in Europe - one in Poland/Ukraine, one in Spain just N of Portugal. Portuguese is in that other sense a Galician dialect gone official language.

love2learnmom said...

Fascinating!

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

I was wrong about Ermland being in Kaliningrad sector. It is in Poland and it is called Varmie now.