Maps With/Without Poland

This week’s Culture.pl newsletter includes a richly illustrated article by Mikołaj Gliński from 2017 titled The Map Is Not the Territory: How Satirists Charted Poland When It Wasn’t on the Map. Here are some paragraphs of comment below the variety of mostly satirical maps. In the late 18th century, Poland disappeared from the political map of Europe and didn’t return until over a century later. But is the map the territory? Where was Poland when it wasn’t there? Culture.pl tries to find Poland in the maps of cartographers and satirists who were suddenly dealing with a missing country that never truly went away. In 1795, the last of a series of partitions effectively wiped Poland off the map of Europe. Naturally the country and its citizens didn’t vanish altogether, and the so-called ‘Polish question’ was an important element of debate in 19th-century Europe. Here’s how cartographers and cartoonists reflected on the position of Poland at a time when the country was relegated from the…

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