Constellations on a Map

This post was inspired by a tweet from a friend of mine, who asked about place names on a map which makes you want to go on a new adventure. She said some parts of the world were littered with names that felt magical and had that draw to adventure for her, like clusters of bright stars.

So i wrote my own list of place names i wondered about before.

Some, like Scandinavia or Ireland, date back to my highschool years. Japan to even before that. Africa to a few years ago when i came back from America. Balkans to last month. Curiosity about Crimea is family inheritence for me. Central Asia is always interesting, but much more now that we are going to visit it with my girlfriend next month.

Anyways, without further ado, here is the list!

The Nordics and the Isles

Isle of Man. Which man is this? It always sounded strong and magical, like a piece of land respected by all the ancient celtic clans surrounding it. Or maybe it was a place of worship and origin, strongly connected to the primeval beginnings of all of them… I’m imagining a scene out of beowulf, storms beating on the shores of a dark island in the middle of the sea.

And what about these islands that straggle the expanse between the British Isles and Scandinavia. A missing link transporting me to an ancient world.

And Iceland. A shining bulwark of that ancient world still standing.

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When i start listening to Irish traditional music again, names of places on the map of Ireland become alive. Tuam, Galway, Mullingar, Killarney, Kilkenny.

These feature so often in music and each get associated with a different thing. In one song the singer will reminisce about “the girls of Tuam”, in another he will sing about finding his brother “stationed in Cork or Killarney,” and that if he goes with him, they will go roving in Kilkenny.

Europe to Asia

And looking around central asia is always a trip. How come i can understand all these place names? Dashoguz, Kyzylorda, Balykchy, Karakol. (Funny, Black Arm (karakol) means police office in turkish now.)

It’s very interesting to look further south and see how central asian turkic melds into Iran and Persian; and through Turkmenistan into Afghan, again Persianic but also mixing into Pakistan and so the South Asian, which begins there and continues towards the other countries of south asia.

And i might look further north and try to trace out when russia begins and turkic ends.

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If we are tracing the transformation from Asian into Europian, then it’s also interesting to look at the Balkans, and see all those comparatively small countries forming a kind of ethnic patchwork tapestry. When you start from Europe and move south across the Balkans, the first non-christian countries start to appear, and you go through many langauges: Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek and Turkish.

And a language you’ve already encountered may pop up again, with different varities of major langauge groups spoken by minorities of other countries; like Aromanian, a language related to Romanian, spoken by its peoples in Albania and Bulgaria, far away from Romania. Or Gagavuzian, a completely separate Turkic language, spoken by the Christian Gagauz people of Moldova, really really far away from Turkey (but almost mutually intelligible!).

It’s quite interesting when you notice a slavic language is just across the sea from Italy over the adriatic (even bordering italy with slovenia). Did the romans ever expect this? (I think they were expecting the Illyrians.) The heartlands of a whole slavic language right next to italy. It seems so surprising.

Ancient Egpyt

There is much more i probably wondered at before, like the colder northern parts of japan. Or the caribbeans and how some islands there somehow preserved a very west african culture as compared to north america.

And also looking at Africa. Like East Africa, how the Bantu made its way through the continent and created this new giant culture that turned into all these central and east african countries of today.

Or looking at Egypt, but not at the city, instead down along the river, towards Nubia. Thinking about the ancient people who became the ancient egyptians. Thousands of years of their rule over those lands in the north. What was it like to have a civilization of thousands of years, and Africa that’s unimaginable today? It’s amazing to think of that early mystical culture born on the banks of a giant river, cradled softly in a primordial desert.

though it was also green once upon a time. even further back in time.

The end and links to some other writing

It is a bit long but i think this is an expansive list of almost all the areas i wondered about in the past.

I wrote about some of these before. The first homework essay i ever wrote was about Japan. I wrote it when i was seven. Will try to add a picture of it if i can ever find it.

I don’t think i ever wrote about the Norse (besides some unfinished essays mentioning the myths in brief), but i had a heated “Scandinavia phase” in mid high-school where i listened to Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt daily, read about Asbjørnsen og Moe, dreaming about them searching for folk stories in Norwegian villages, and scoured the internet for any Theodor Kittelsen painting i could find.

I never wrote about the Irish but i recorded some Gaelic melodies on the tin whistle, like Whiskey in the Jar or the Auld Lang Syne (i played it on new year!) which are on my YouTube page.

One of the only topics i mentioned here which i’ve been successful in publishing about is Central Asia. This blog post following the migration of a Persian word into Turkish and then into English has a big section about the Turko-Persian mix. And an old blog post i have mentions an Italian colony and their linguistic legacy in the language of the Crimean-Turkish of my grandmother’s grandmother.

My interest in Bosnia is fairly new. I only have the daily writings i published during my week long stay there, available over on Instagram. About Moldova, i have an almost finished blog post about the Jewish culture i didn’t expect to find there.

For Africa i have two unfinished essays. One about West Africa and the Bantu sculptures which have been taken to British museums, and the other about Meroë, the descendants of Ancient Egyptians in the time of the Romans.

About the Caribbeans, the African culture across the oceans, i wrote a draft essay about their music, Reggae, and its influence worldwide and on Turkey, called “Reggae and Turkey”. It was a project i spent weeks on and had already written 10 pages (10 polished pages for a blog post is a lot). Even if these are unfinished, the research i did for them really benefited my worldview and i learned a lot of things i was curious about.

New year new voyages

This is kinda shaping up to a “New Year New Goals” post. So I’d like to say a few things about travelling in the new year and what it’s been like last year.

Ecem (my girlfriend) introduced us to a great Kazakh friend she connected with online and thanks to her efforts, the place names there feel more real than ever, as we will be visiting and staying there next month, and more so because we have a friend who is from that country.

My interest in the Balkans has also been sparked by Ecem, since she convinced me to go on two trips there in 2024, one to Moldova, one to Bosnia, despite my initial reluctance.

I wish to make the names on these maps feel more real in the near future, by meeting people of those lands, through methods i’ve recently learned of (like couchsurfing, i already hosted my first guest last January, a bike traveller all the way from Germany!), and by visiting the names on the map in person, to learn their histories, their languages as much as i can, and taking care to spend time in places tourists normally find the most uninteresting. Those places are where the real fun is at!