Most of what we think of as Ancient Greece sits in modern Turkey or on sovereign Greek islands that sit only a few miles off the Turkish coast such as Lesbos, from which the word “lesbian” derives, because of the poet Sappho, from whom the word “sapphic” derives. In Greek mythology, the Chimera is a fire-breathing mythical monster with the front of a lion, the middle of a goat, and the rear of a dragon. It was slain by the hero Bellerophon, who rose in the ancient city of Corinth and rode the winged horse Pegasus. Chimaera, however, is the site of a mountain that sits in modern-day Turkey, near where the Mediterranean coast turns upward. On the top of the mountain, methane leaks from deep in the Earth and, possibly sparked by some forest fire or lightning eons ago, burns eternally like a divine Weber. Ancient mariners used its light at night as a waypoint, and they must have filled in the stories. My friend Andrew and I drove by several years ago, and he insisted we sweat our way up the mountain with some Cubans, whereupon we were able to light the cigars with the ancient natural flames, with only minimal hand burns.
Today, the word “chimeric” means two things, both derived from the monstrous myth. Because the monster is an amalgam of animals, a chimera can mean something made of mixed parts. Or it can mean something illusory and wished for, a dream. It’s a bit like the word “Byzantine,” which means highly complicated, because in the city of Byzantium (now Istanbul) once existed the most complex bureaucracy the world had ever seen. More problematically, the verb to be “shanghaied,” meaning to be screwed over underhandedly, derives from the Opium War, when men were drugged, abducted, and forced into service as sailors on naval ships that were often bound for Shanghai.
These words (“chimera,” “chimeric,” “sapphic,” “Cuban” in the noun-sense meaning a cigar, “Byzantine,” “shanghaied”) are all toponyms — or words named for places. (“Topos,” in Greek, means place.) There are many exceptions, such as Shanghai, but there’s a reason so many of them come from the Mediterranean world: English may be a Germanic language in formal linguistic terms, but Latin and Greek cultural and literary influences are everywhere within it, which is one reason many (though not all) complaints about curricula being “Eurocentric” are so illiterate. The Italian island of Vulcano is where the toponym “volcano” comes from, and we’re richer for knowing these sorts of things. They fill in gaps and defog geography and history and language.
Many toponyms are simply famous regional foods, which is why there is a fun but false fact floating around that Germans heard JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” line to mean “I am a doughnut.” (A Berliner is a type of doughnut, but no German would misinterpret his meaning.) The words “wiener” and “hamburger” are toponyms for Vienna and Hamburg, putting aside that the hamburger in its modern form was really invented in Connecticut. Stranger still, the bird we eat on Thanksgiving was named for the country, though the species, Meleagris gallopavo domesticus, is native to the Americas. Turkish Guinea hens were commonly called turkey hens or turkey cocks once imported into Europe after trade with the New World was well established because they reminded Europeans of turkeys, the American bird. By the time the Turkish Republic was established in 1922, replacing the Ottoman Empire, it was easy to forget which came first: the animal or the place. It got easier to remember at the beginning of June, as Turkey filed with the United Nations to be called Turkiye internationally in order to, per its foreign minister, “increase our country’s brand value.” Lots of words come from places, lots of them in the country once known as Turkey, and it makes the world a less mysterious place but a no less interesting place to know where they originate.
