Recent searches
Search options
@opencage@en.osm.townLast week in #geoweirdness we covered Antarctica. This week we head back to Europe to consider geographic oddities of Denmark 
1/
2/ First up, the country Denmark is just one part of the Kingdom of Denmark, or "The Danish Realm", which also includes Greenland 
and the Faroe Islands 
3/ Greenland uses the Danish postal code system while Faroe Islands does not
4/ As we covered in our Canada 
thread a month ago, last year we had the exciting news that Canada and the Kingdom of Denmark resolved their dispute over remote Hans Island, ending the "Whisky War" in which the armies of each country left bottle of alcohol for each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisky_War
As a result, Greenland now shares a land border with Canada.
5/ Denmark's other land border is with 
Germany, and was set via plebiscite in 1920 thus finally resolving "the Schleswig-Holstein question", a repeated source of conflict in 19th century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig%E2%80%93Holstein_question
Today there is an officially recognised German-speaking minority in Denmark, and an equivalent Danish-speaking minority in Germany:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Minderheit_in_D%C3%A4nemark
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_minority_of_Southern_Schleswig
6/ One could also argue Denmark added a land border with Sweden 
with the completion of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, connecting Copenhagen and Malmö across the Øresund strait
7/ Denmark includes the island of Bornholm, farther east in the Baltic. It is closer to Sweden , Germany , and Poland 
than the rest of Denmark, and was briefly occupied by the Soviets at the end of of WWII
8/ The Danish Realm was once much larger and included colonies in India, West Africa, and the Caribbean
9/ What is today known as the US Virgin Islands 
was once the "Danish West Indies" before being sold to the United States 
in 1917
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_the_Danish_West_Indies
10/ Turning back to the present, Denmark is part of the European Union 
, but the Faroe Islands and Greenland are not.
Denmark is however unique amongst EU countries in that it does not have to adopt the Euro 
as its currency
11/ We hope you enjoyed our look at Danish #geoweirdness
If Nordic geo oddities are your thing, you will enjoy our thread about Norway 
(the two countries were in union for almost 300 years)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark%E2%80%93Norway
https://en.osm.town/@opencage/109692763601977891
Thanks for reading (and sharing). What did we miss?
We have more threads about specific countries, border disputes, geocoding, etc on our blog. Some still on twitter, but over time we are moving them to masto. Enjoy.
Final bonus toot: here’s the interview we did a few years back with Søren Johannessen (sadly not yet on masto) about the state of #OpenStreetMap in Denmark
https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/105260308398/country-profile-state-of-openstreetmap-in
@opencage pre-Brexit, it shared that feature with the UK 
@opencage
Bornholm was occupied by the Soviet from the 9th of May 1945, just four days after the liberation, until the 5th of April 1946. The Soviet bombed Rønne and Nexø where 10 people died, cus the German officer didn't want to surrender to the Soviet, but to the English. All it would have taken was one single English lieutenant, but Bornholm wasn't important enough.