This is a map of the south east of England. It's geographically recognisable, but the spelling seems a little… Well, Polish.
There's Istbon, Saufend-on-Sji, Hejstynz, Dzylynem, Tanbrydz-Lelz.
Where did this hilarious map come from? It was made for the use of the Polish Air Force.
All the notoriously hard-to-pronounce English place names have been transliterated - spelt phonetically so the Polish pilots can pronounce them as Britishly as possible.
It's actually quite useful for doing the opposite of what it was meant for - teaching English speakers how to spell in Polish.
My Polish is better already. Dobrze zrobione! It dates back to the Cold War, at a time when both sides were preparing for it to suddenly get hot.
This famously involved America and Russia massing enough nuclear warheads to destroy the entire world many times over, Which at the time was considered a perfectly reasonable use of taxpayer money.
But it less famously involved the Soviet production of thousands of maps that to this day very few people know very little about with even more people knowing even less.
These were part of an enormous military mapping exercise begun by Stalin and continued by a series of other, less famous, but probably nicer Russian leaders throughout the Cold War.
Because they're Soviet made, you might expect these maps to be somehow laughably defective Like the ones we discussed in an episode about Soviet maps that left enormous blank spaces for places they wanted people to forget about.
