ABSTRACT
In order to exist as a region, eastern Europe had to be entered on a map. It had to be allocated a space and given a name, both of them constituting a cartographic image. Those maps constitute the oldest visual record of the region long before the term eastern Europe became current. Apart from the standard Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and East Central Europe, the region attracted an astonishing assortment of other names, such as Sarmatia Europea, Slavic Europe, New Europe, ‘shatter zone’, ‘the belt of political change’, cordon sanitaire, ‘Other Europe’, Communist Bloc, ‘kidnapped west’, and post-communist Europe. The subsequent arbitrary gesture of reshaping the map of Europe in Yalta stabilised the territory by confining it behind the Iron Curtain.
