I recently discovered that, up until about a century and a half ago, no one really knew what the island of Cyprus was shaped like. Maps had been made for centuries, of course, but no one had really undertaken a scientific survey of the island until 1851. Most of these maps showed it looking something like the following Venetian map printed in 1570, just prior to its conquest by the Ottoman Turks:



More accurate maps would come only in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the first really accurate one was produced by Lord Kitchener after the British acquired Cyprus in 1878. (Yes, this is the same Lord Kitchener after whom Berlin, Ontario, was renamed during the Great War.) Kitchener undertook the first triangulated survey of the island, an event recounted in the following article: “Kitchener’s Survey of Cyprus 1878-1883." Now, of course, we know that the island looks like this:



After reading this article, I became aware that I have long had a map on my home office wall of “The Turkish Empire in Europe and Asia, with the Kingdom of Greece,” published in London and “Corrected to 1st June 1845.” Sure enough, the shape of Cyprus on this map is distorted, more resembling the 16th century Venetian map than the contemporary one immediately above. I suppose I had originally attributed this distortion to the lack of artistic skill in the cartographer. But it seems no one at that time understood what the island really looked like.