The Wall After the Berlin Wall

A couple of days ago, Red Baron had an "aha" experience. The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ) projected the trace of The Wall against Mexico POTUS insists so much in its total length (3200 km) onto a map of Europe. The WAZ wanted to give its readers a feeling of how long The Wall along the Mexican border is compared to the Berlin Wall. Readers were even invited to move the trace of The Wall arbitrarily around the European continent.

©WAZ

When choosing Paris as the western starting point of the imaginary wall, I suddenly realized that its trace nicely follows the traditional Orient Express track.

©Wikipedia/Arjan de Boer

Remember Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express? Detective Hercule Poirot was on the luxury train from London to Istanbul* in the 1930ies touching Paris, Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Munich, Vienna, and Budapest.
*It was in 1930 when the Turks renamed Constantinople

Remember the song?

Istanbul was Constantinople.
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople.
Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it, I can't say
People just liked it better that way.
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks.

Back to Poirot's train ride. Hercule did not get to Constantinople because an avalanche stopped his Orient Express deep in the Yugoslavian wilderness. However, it is intriguing to note that the railroad track following the imaginary trace of The Wall abruptly ends at the Bulgarian-Turkish border on today's map.

Conspiracy alert! It certainly must have to do with the fact that POTUS and HEPOT (His Excellency President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan), although partners in NATO, are no friends. While the latter wants to eliminate the Kurds in Iraque, the former likes to protect those eager fighters needed against ISIS. Fact is, the Kurds thriving for a State of their own - in the manner of the late 19th century - are, as on previous occasions in history, again caught between two stools.
*Already in 1892, German fiction author Karl May as traveling Kara Ben Nemsi, wrote about those rifle-loving men in his novel Durchs wilde Kurdistan (Roaming in Wild Kurdistan)

©Wikipedia/Arjan de Boer

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