Greece on the Atlantic
Peter Suber, Philosophy Department, Earlham College

An idle thought. Doesn't the geography of the Blue Hill Peninsula in Maine bear an uncanny resemblance to that of Greece? The most striking difference is that Greece is 120 miles wide and the Blue Hill Peninsula is about 12. It's as if the glacier that carved the Blue Hill Peninsula were trying to engineer the Greek landscape at 1/10 scale.

If other have noticed these parallels before, I haven't been able to find their observations. But if I'm overlooking something, please drop me a line. (I'm also looking for a small silhouette of the Blue Hill Peninsula to go with my silhouette of Greece below.) Meantime, here are some of the major parallels.

Blue Hill Peninsula Greece
Eggemoggin Reach Gulf of Corinth
Naskeag Point Sunium
Flye Point Rhamnus
Deer Isle Peloponnese
Penobscot Bay Ionian Sea
Blue Hill Bay Aegean Sea
Mount Desert Island Turkey
Union River Bay Thermaikos Kolpos
Newbury Neck Promirion, Mileai
Long Island Euboea
Bartlett Island Lesbos
Swans Island Naxos
Isle au Haut Crete
Islesboro Ithaca and Cephalonia
Cape Rosier Akra Skrofa
Bagaduce River Amyrakikos Kolpos
Verona Island Corfu
Ellsworth Thessalonika
East Blue Hill Volos
Blue Hill Lamia
Blue Hill Falls Thermopylae
North Brooklin Marathon
Brooklin Athens
Stonington Sparta
Sedgwick Boeotia
Sargentville Delphi
Walker Pond Lumni Trikhonis
Buck's Harbor Mesolongi, Aitolikon
Castine Preveza
Orland Igoumenitsa

In the table above, some of my Greek placenames are Anglicized and some are not. This is due to the different usages on the different maps I consulted. One day I hope to make the names consistent.

Here are two online maps that come close to giving the sense of this deep geographic similarity. But they don't let you make the comparison in detail. You really need a large print atlas and a cup of coffee.

Blue Hill Peninsula

Blue Hill Peninsula
Map centered on latitude 44.31 N and longitude 68.63 W.
Top to bottom of region mapped represents 19.32 miles.
Generated by the Xerox PARC Map Viewer. See the interactive version of this map.

Greece

Greece
Map centered on latitude 38.45 N and longitude 22.41 E.
Top to bottom of region mapped represents 387.78 miles.
Generated by the Xerox PARC Map Viewer. See the interactive version of this map.

Here are some other, less adequate online maps of the two regions.

[Blue
Ribbon] Peter Suber, Department of Philosophy, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, 47374, U.S.A.
peters@earlham.edu. Copyright © 1998, Peter Suber.