Due (I believe) to boundaries being redrawn after the fall of the Soviet Union, there is an area of Russia that is not “attached” to the main country. It sits on the Baltic sea, between Poland and Lithuania. I hadn’t been aware of this until i was looking at Google maps recently and noticed that there was no country label on the area.
Alaska is the only other similar situation I can think of.
Other than islands, are there other such places?
Would Gibraltar count?
There are also the India-Bangladesh enclaves India–Bangladesh enclaves - Wikipedia - inside Bangladesh, there are several bits of Indian territory, some of which contain smaller bits of Bangladeshi territory, and one of those has an even tinier bit of Indian territory.
Oops. The Indian/Bangladeshi enclaves were resolved a few years ago - except for one…
Büsingen is a German enclave in Switzerland.
The word you’re looking for is exclave and semi-exclave. True exclaves are completely surrounded, like *Llívia * (Spanish in France), Campione d’Italia (Italian in Switzerland) or Büsingen am Hochrhein (German in Switzerland). Semi-exclaves, like *Kalingrad Oblast *(which I assume is where the OP was referring to) can be reached by sea from the parent territory.
I think true exclaves are also necessarily true enclaves. But the reverse is not true.
Belgium and the Netherlands have multiple enclaves and exclaves, and there’s even a bit of Belgium entirely inside the Netherlands that has a bit of The Netherlands entirely within that. Google Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau for details.
The Northwest Angle is part of the state of Minnesota, but can only be reached by land by going through Manitoba:
Point Roberts, Washington, can only be reached by land by going through British Columbia:
The main part and the small part of Russia have shorelines on the same sea, and I assume that Russia claims territorial waters, so there’s no need to cross another country’s borders to access the part between Poland and Lithuania. So per Mr Dibble’s definitions, this appears to be a semi-exclave, and I guess I’m not really sure why a semi-exclave is remarkable. This situation is topologically identical to Northern Ireland, isn’t it? Surely there must be a large number of such cases?
Thanks, everyone. I never knew about the Northwest Angle in Minnesota. That’s pretty interesting.
Mr. Dibble, yes, that’s what I was referring to.
Riemann, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania separate the Kalingrad Oblast from the next closest Russian coast. I’m certainly no expert on territorial waters, but would Russia really have such a claim?
I’m no expert either, and a quick Google shows there’s a long history of disputes in the area. But however far territorial waters extend, surely it’s not in doubt that all countries with coastlines on the Baltic Sea have a right to access them?
A scale down, but a piece of Delaware is on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River.
There’s a little piece of Bolivia on the coast of Peru, to make up for the fact that their old sea corridor is now part of Chile (and they ain’t giving it back
I don’t think the Gulf of Finland is so narrow that it’s completely covered by the national waters of the surrounding countries. At least my atlas, which is pretty good about showing these things, does not show a water boundary in the middle of it. So Russian ships should be able to get to Kaliningrad without problems.
However, in narrow straights where the national waters of two countries meet in the middle, there’s virtually always a treaty that allows international shipping to go through those waters without undue hinderance. Examples: Gibraltar, Malacca, English Channel, Juan de Fuca, and Øresund, but there are a number of others. Also there’s one for the Dardanelles and Bosporus, even though that’s just one country’s national waters.
Maybe off-topic, since it is an island. Liberty Island (the home of the Statue of Liberty) is in the state of New York - completely surrounded by New Jersey territory (all water).
And a piece of Michigan is on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan.
Cabinda is part of Angola that is separated from the rest of it by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and there’s a tiny bit of Bosnia that comes all the way down to the coast, cutting off the southern tip of the Croatian coast from the rest of Croatia.
There’s also French Guiana in South America, which is a department of France (departments are France’s largest internal subdivisions, the closest thing they have to US states).
If we go back in history a few years, there was East Pakistan and West Pakistan.
There’s a recent thread about that fugitive Indian guru who proclaimed a sovereign nation without borders, having a headquarters on some island of poorly defined location. I’ve heard the idea suggested that the Catholic Church is, in some senses, a sovereign nation without borders, having citizens all over the world.
What about Campobello?
Apparently the islanders are currently pissed off with US border patrol agents. "Some days every item of mail - which are placed in a bonded truck in Canada and then sent about 80km (50 miles) through Maine and over the international Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge to Campobello - is inspected. Some packages have been seized."
Yes, the Upper Penisula.
The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast was once called Pomerania, and was initially part of the original Prussia (of Napoleonic era fame), which stretched along the Baltic coast from where Kaliningrad is today to roughly where the eastern boundary of Germany is today, and also south along the eastern border of present-day German, and southeast again in what was called Silesia, in a Wroclaw/Katowice line.
Here’s a map showing how it shrank in the 20th century.
Both of the areas lost territory after World War 1, and Pomerania in particular, lost a stretch of Baltic coast to Poland, cutting the area around Konigsberg off from the rest of Germany. That area was known as East Prussia. After WWII, the Russians kept most of East Prussia by right of conquest, and split some off to Lithuania and Poland.
