Crimea
It depends on how far back you go. We remember when Myanmar was Burma, when Sri Lanka was Ceylon, when Tanzania was Tanganyika … and people alive today might remember when Austria and Hungary were one country. Sort of. But anything involving the Slavic nations takes more than a little time and effort to understand.
We have ancestors from Russia and Ukraine, back at the turn of the century — the 20th century, that is. Then Russia became the USSR and Ukraine part of that. Poor Crimea. Would it surprise you to know it has, at various times, been colonised by the Greeks, Persians, Romans, Genoese, and the Ottoman Empire. After the 1917 Russian Revolution it became part of the USSR, then somehow was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR, then became “Autonomous” in 1991 and, more recently, and highly disputed, again part of the Russian Federation.
It’s not part of our brief to decide who (or what) owns Crimea now. The land is the same as it always was, and the shifting tides of landlords will continue to leave their mark. We are just using Crimea as an example of what to do about postcards from there. When we started GPS, it was undeniably part of Ukraine. To be honest, in the unlikely event we got an order from Sevastopol or Yalta now, we wouldn’t know how to address the parcel, without guidance. We’re not going to relocate our few Crimean cards from Ukraine into any other category.
If you have an eagle eye, you might notice that some of our geographical categories merge (such as Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia) while others don’t (such as Slovakia, by itself). We list Yugoslavia separately from Serbia, and once in awhile when we get a CCCP-era card from Kiev, we list it as Russia/USSR instead of Ukraine. We’re the first to acknowledge this could be confusing and is not always logical. But we have other things on our mind too, and will let it go on like this until there are compelling reasons to change.
So Crimea, for us, remains in Ukraine.
(P.S.: the contest from the last entry. Clever Kerry! Yes, the scene is in China’s Xinjiang Province, a place of immense beauty.)
Interesting article. The map of Europe has been a kaleidoscope of different states and territories ever since the fall of Rome and I doubt if we have seen the end of it yet. But this makes collecting post cards all that more interesting. The more countries the more interesting cards to collect. Now if Germany would ever go back to pre-German Empire boundaries think of how many new countries we would be able to collect.
~Goloh replies: Absolutely. We can barely keep up with it as it is. One thing for certain, we won’t start reassigning cards to new geographic categories.