http://kalimac.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] kalimac.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] steepholm 2015-03-20 02:25 am (UTC)

It is, however, the same spot on the surface of the Earth. If you wish to locate that spot, you need to know what it is now.

That it was under different administration then is indeed worthy of note, but no more so than that it's worthy of note that getting TB in the 16th century was quite a different proposition from getting it today.

It has long been a hobby of mine to map the birthplaces of composers. I don't see how it's reasonable to discuss the birthplace of Bela Bartok, Hungarian nationalist, without noting both that his birthplace was in Hungary then and in Romania now.

I was driven to distraction trying to find the birthplace of Mily Balakirev in Russia. Encyclopedias said he was from Nizhny Novgorod, a town I could find on no map, no matter how comprehensive. If only the encyclopedias had bothered to say that the name had since been changed to Gorky, I could have found it. (With the fall of the USSR, it was changed back again, but I was doing my looking before that happened.)

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