Olbia & Lakany, south of Lakanadar

 Yep, Christmas Eve and I'm still here.  Everything's done for the holidays except the festivities this evening and tomorrow.  Christmas dinner's been moved off until tomorrow, and that's easy peasy.  Once you've cooked for a hundred people, six is a piece of cake.

So I've got time for a bit of map.  Taking tomorrow off, though.  First day missed since I started this map blog.  So let's start with this isolated tail on the Azov map.  This eastern stretch reaches the edge of Itossia, which won't get mapped for a long while. 

Itossia is an outlying part of the Sanjak of Cumana, occupied by the half-orc Yetabeshi tribe.  I wrote about all this ages ago.  The land itself is nothing special to speak of ... just more steppeland.

This second section, however, is more interesting.  We've come to the mouth of the Dneiper:

Ozi, more accurately Olbia (fixed), is the remnant of a very ancient Greek colony founded in the 7th century BCE, to trade with the Scythians of that time.  It's still occupied by Greek traders; the small region is an Emirate, jointly controlled by Ottoman overseers and a Greek bureaucracy.  The city of Ozi has a Tartar name; the Greeks call it "Alektor."  It's essentially a wholesale transshipment point, with little trade that isn't already earmarked for some other place.  Much of Constantinople's grain supply comes from this one little place.

The presence of the sea makes a complicated mess of the roads.  The way it changes the usual distribution of places and hexes is a fascinating challenge.  I think the result is evocative of adventure, though I'll grant it looks even better when the unmade adjacent areas are also mapped.

But we'll get there.