Copy a country

[Tyr]

I was looking at a map of the US the other day and a thought struck me 'Doesn't West Virginia look a bit Cyprussy?'

The resemblance is small, it doesn't of course, nonetheles...an idea was born....

Sometime in history...how could we get it so that a country or a state or province or whathaveyou is formed in such a way that its borders precisely mimic the borders of another nation- living or dead?

i.e. The Ponians don't just get 100 km2 of land to make up for losing Ponia, they get land of exactly the same shape on a map.

 

[Emperor-of-New-Zealand]

I've always found it amusing that if you flip over Nova Zemlya and place it next to New Zealand, they are similarly shaped, and both have the acronym 'NZ'. Not directly related to the OP but interesting nonetheless.

 

[Esopo]

I often thought that kazakhstan's and austria-hungary's borders are somewhat similar.

 

[scholar]

West Virginia's borders are born out of rivers and a mountain range, but even so they would not have formed without the civil war tearing the Commonwealth of Virginia apart.

Cyprus's borders are entirely a product of geography, being an island and having little to no other territory.

 

[NomadicSky]

The British Columbia-Alberta border looks similar to California-Nevada. British Columbia even looks like a short chubby California.

 

[Oracle of Sobek 𓆋]

I think your best bet is copying two landlocked countries... Two polities with coastlines in different locations are never going to be contiguous.

That said, Niger always looked like it was trying to copy Mali to me...

 

[Falecius]

I think your best bet is copying two landlocked countries... Two polities with coastlines in different locations are never going to be contiguous.

That said, Niger always looked like it was trying to copy Mali to me...

The similarity is not so great, but was done somehow on purpose by the French to organize both as having parts of the Niger valley and control convenient bits of the desert. I doubt that how the places looked similar on the map was ever anybody's concern in that case, though it may have had a higher priority that the wishes of the actual inhabitants I guess.

 

[Tyr]

I think your best bet is copying two landlocked countries... Two polities with coastlines in different locations are never going to be contiguous.

That said, Niger always looked like it was trying to copy Mali to me...

I don't know. To take the Cyprus example- say the Turks get super evollll and chase the Cypriots away who then move to Russia; the Russian Tsar is a bit mad and decides to give them some land which is shaped just like Cyprus on a map as a new province.
The actually geography of the place would be utterly different of course but...I'm just talking of map mimicking here.