Why is it? Because the Turkish perspective on the world is sometimes quite special? Or because, from a global perspective, there have long been alternative facts in addition to the actual ones? Or, third thesis: Has mankind, spellbound, even paralyzed by concern about the rapidly advancing climate change, not noticed that continental drift has also accelerated massively?
In any case, anyone with a little knowledge of global geography will have been amazed when they looked at the screens for the entertainment program on board a Turkish Airlines plane recently. When there were no films running, but the flight route was shown, it was still the best science fiction.
The navel of this world, the Turkish Airlines hub in Istanbul, was correctly marked on the map. And that also applied to some cities on the periphery: Helsinki and Stockholm, for example, as well as Glasgow and Lisbon. But little else fitted in with what had previously been thought to be territorial reality: on board this flight from Bangkok to Istanbul, Bucharest mutated into the capital of Iceland, Barcelona was suddenly in Yemen, Chicago in Israel and Ho Chi Minh City on the Turkish Rivera.
Also in Turkey, located inland: Osaka. Recently not far away from Chicago, namely in Lebanon: Billund. Genoa? Still a port city, but now on the Black Sea. Los Angeles: Still the second largest metropolitan area, but no longer in the USA, but in Western Europe. The best way to get there is probably via Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. A rather subtle migration, on the other hand: the Romanian city of Konstanza takes the place of Konstanz on Lake Constance.
Of course, there are always winners and losers in such far-reaching changes. Billund: more sun. Barcelona: supposedly solved the overtourism problem. Edinburgh, on the other hand, is now under Chinese control, not far from the North Korean and Russian borders, which is even more fatal than being under British control.
The cards say nothing about whether the associated countries may have swapped places. So all of Scotland has gone as far as possible from England and Romania finally wants to be as cool in the eyes of the Europeans as Iceland. In any case, the following applies to passengers: Traveling is finally becoming an adventure again with an uncertain destination.
Stefan Fischer finds it obvious that American cities go into exile.
(Photo: Bernd Schifferdecker (Illustration))