Cortina Panorama

When I first watched the television coverage of the Milan-Cortina Olympics I thought I saw some pretty impressive map graphics but a long online search for them has come up short. However, I did find this very nice map of the Cortina area.

The map is from Cormar Panoramic Maps, a company based in Bolzano, Italy not far from Cortina. This year’s Olympics are very spread out and only a few events are being held in Cortina. Those include curling, women’s alpine skiing, bobsled and luge, all of these in the immediate vicinity of the town.

The Ossario in the bottom left above is a World War I monument. 

There’s a lot of nice looking ski areas that from what I can tell are not being used in these Olympics at all. If you’re staying there to watch curling you’ll have plenty of access to ski areas.

Here is a map from the IOC, via TrueNorth, a Canadian Sports blog, showing just how spread out these Olympics are. For context the distance between Milano and Venezia across the bottom of the map is 267 kilometers (166 miles). 

 

 

 

 

Circassians and the Sochi Olympics

The are several excellent articles in GeoCurrents about the largely forgotten (in the West) Circassian people whose territory was centered in the Sochi region. The majority of these people were either massacred or forced out of the Caucasus in the 19th century and primarily settled in the Ottoman Empire. Russia has three partly Circassian republics, as illustrated here.

Many Circassians outside the Caucasus dream of returning to the area and having a unified republic. However, Russia has imposed immigration quotas and other restrictive laws. Poverty and violence in nearby places, notably Chechnya, have also slowed Circassian migration.

Circassian nationalists have organized a protest movement over the Olympics calling attention to the history of oppression, the disturbance of burial sites including possible mass graves, and the location of the Olympic skiing events at Krasnya Polyana, the site of their last major battle with the Russians.

This skiing facility, the easternmost dot on the map above, is also claimed by some Abkhazians. While linguistically similar to Circassians, Abkhazians have a tense coexistance with them, partly due to their enlisting the help of Russia in their own struggle for independence from the Republic of Georgia.  

For more on the Circassians see the GeoCurrents article that the top map was taken from.