clockwise around the Black Sea
- Star Tales - Cepheus (ianridpath.com)
Cepheus was the mythological king of Ethiopia. He was deemed worthy of a place in the sky because he was fourth in descent from the nymph Io, one of the loves of Zeus – and having Zeus as a relative was always an advantage when it came to being commemorated among the constellations. The kingdom of Cepheus was not the Ethiopia we know today, but stretched from the south-eastern shore of the Mediterranean southwards to the Red Sea, an area that contains parts of the modern Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Ptolemy described him as wearing the tiara-like head-dress of a Persian king, as he is shown on John Flamsteed’s star atlas…
- Moldova (Wikipedia)
Moldova (/mɒlˈdoʊvə/ mol-DOH-və, sometimes UK: /ˈmɒldəvə/ MOL-də-və; Romanian pronunciation: [molˈdova]), officially the Republic of Moldova (Romanian: Republica Moldova), is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, on the northeastern corner of the Balkans. The country spans a total of 33,483 km2 (13,067 sq mi) and has a population of approximately 2.5 million as of January 2023. Moldova is bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east, and south. The unrecognised breakaway state of Transnistria lies across the Dniester river on the country’s eastern border with Ukraine. Moldova is a unitary parliamentary representative democratic republic with its capital in Chișinău, the country’s largest city and main cultural and commercial centre.
