Countries in the world come in all different shapes and sizes. Some are huge, while others are tiny. And then some have very clearly defined shapes, like these, and others, well, not so much.
Borders are a funny thing and don't often make sense without some historical or geographical context. Sometimes borders take on an exceptionally bizarre look, extending away from the home country like a tentacle, or an extra limb. This is called a panhandle, or a salient, and we are going to look at five of the strangest examples of these from around the world.
To begin with, we're going to Italy to look at this example, the province of Trieste. This province extends 48 kilometers, or 30 miles down the coast away from Italy and into Slovenia. History is the reason why this situation exists today.
Basically this entire territory used to be a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. And outside of Battlefield 1, nobody has ever heard that name in a very long time because World War I happened, and Italy took over a bunch of their land after winning. But then Mussolini happened, and Italy lost World War II and, therefore, lost pretty much all of that territory that they had won in the first war.
Trieste became an independent city-state under UN protection in 1947, but that only lasted until 1954, when the tiny country's territory was divided between Italy and Yugoslavia. The part that Italy occupied in 1954 remains the border of today, and that is why the border here looks so odd. Next up at number four, we are going pretty far away, to India, which looks mostly normal, except for this mesh over here in the east.
Zooming in a little closer, we can see that this side of India and this side of India is connected by only a very tiny sliver of land known as the Siliguri Corridor. This awkward situation, like every other entry on this list from here on out, came about as a result from colonialism. When India gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1947, the British decided to partition India between a Hindu part and a Muslim part.
Pakistan became the Muslim part and, at the time, consisted of West Pakistan here and East Pakistan here. Pakistan was separated by all of India from her two halves. And the Northeast of India was only connected by the Siliguri Corridor.
At one point, the corridor is not even 27 kilometers, or 17 miles, wide. The Indian state of Sikkim extends north of the corridor and separates Nepal from Bhutan. And they connects to the seven other Indian states in the east, with a population of almost 45 million people between them.
So 45 million Indians are connected to the rest of their country by a corridor that, at one point, is only 27 kilometers long. We're going to move slightly up north to Afghanistan for our next example. Much like how an appendix serves no clear purpose to humans any longer, the Wakhan corridor in Afghanistan seems like it makes no sense.
It is a part of Afghanistan that stretches out for a very long 350 kilometers, or 220 miles, away from the rest of the country. In width, the corridor varies from between just 13 kilometers to 65 kilometers, or 8 to 40 miles. The corridor means that Afghanistan shares a tiny land border with China and completely separates Tajikistan from Pakistan.
It doesn't make much sense now, but pushing the clock back over a century explains why it exists today. In the 19th century, the Russian and British empires were both competing for territory here. Russia ruled Central Asia, and Britain ruled India.
To settle a dispute between either empire gaining more land and influence in the region, both agreed to respect Afghanistan as an independent country that would serve as a buffer region between them. But the borders of Afghanistan at the time didn't exactly match up between the Russian and the British borders, so they decided to expand Afghanistan 350 kilometers east to fit between the rest of the space. Over a century later, the corridor remains, but as a border between Tajikistan and Pakistan.
Our next two entries are both located in Africa, whose colonial past is obvious when you look at the continent's borders. We're going to start with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has not one, but two, panhandles. The Congo used to be a colony of Belgium.
And the Belgians created this one on the left called Congo Central so that they could access their enormous colony from the ocean. The second down here is called the Congo pedicle. It cuts between 200 kilometers into Zambia and varies between 70 to 100 kilometers wide.
The pedicle is even more awkward than it looks. Basically, back when the Congo was a Belgian colony and Zambia was a British colony, the two sides could not agree on the colonial borders. The Belgians wanted access to the rich swamplands here that had a lot of wildlife they could hunt for their precious trophies.
So the two sides got the King of Italy to intervene and draw the border for them. Knowing about as much about Africa as you would expect of a man in the 19th century before the internet, the King just drew a line on a map in front of him and decided that it looked good. And the two other sides thought that it looked good enough, and, boom, there was the border.
And it's still there today. Finally, and perhaps most bizarrely, we have the case of Namibia, which has this absurd protrusion in the Northeast of the country. This extension is called the Caprivi strip, and it goes for 450 kilometers or 280 miles away from the rest of Namibia.
This bizarre border exists because, between 1884 and 1915, Namibia was a colony of Germany. In 1890, the chancellor of Germany named Leo Von Caprivi, for whom the strip is named after, wanted of the colony's border to extend to the Zambezi River here so that Germany could navigate the river to the African east coast. In a treaty with Britain, Germany gave up all colonial claims to the territory of Zanzibar and, in exchange, was granted the strip, stretching hundreds of kilometers across the continent.
It makes less sense when you look at an actual ethnic map of Africa, which roughly looks like this. As you can see, the strip covers numerous ethnic and linguistic groups that were not taken into any consideration prior to the decision. Today the existence of the strip means that Botswana is almost entirely blocked off from bordering Zambia, other than a very tiny opening on the Zambezi River here.
And Namibia almost borders Zimbabwe, just 200 meters down the same river. There were a lot of other strange borders in the world to be covered, but that's all for now. Leave your comments below about what you think are the strangest international borders.
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