Totius Graecia : Nicolaos Sophianos's Map of Greece and the Transformations of Hellenism

The sole surviving map of Greece composed by Nicolaos Sophianos, Totius Graeciae Descriptio (1552), a large mural map in four sheets, had an impact on the cartography of Greece for centuries to follow. In its composition, the work implies a particular definition of Greek lands, based on the notions of Hellenism and the geographical and historical dispersion of the Greek population. Such conceptions also underlie Rhigas's monumental Carta (1797) and continue to be observed in the historical cartography of Greece up through the nineteenth century, most notably in the large propaganda maps issued by Paparrigopoulos and Kiepert that were published by the Association for the Dissemination of Greek Learning (1875-1915). A comparative study of these three maps, as well as a series of similar maps of Greece done by Western cartographers, sheds light on the uses of Hellenism in the formatting procedures of modern Greek territorial identity.