As early as 1993, German users of Usenet – a network of online discussion forms (or bulletin boards), which predates the web – had a running joke that the Westfalian town of Bielefeld (population 300,000, funnily enough) was a fiction maintained by the CIA, Mossad, aliens or some combination of the three. ![]() The joke – or painstakingly well-evidenced and argued theory – that a country or region doesn’t exist turns out to be one of the oldest memes on the internet. Last summer, another Reddit user suggested the Italian region of Molise – population 300,000 – doesn’t exist, apparently as the result of an Italian in-joke, while Brazilians have had for at least five years an online theory that the north-western state of Acre doesn’t exist or else is a land that time forgot, still populated by dinosaurs. ![]() Finland, the user Raregan explained, was merely a fictional creation designed to create fishing quotas to aid the export of sushi to Japan from Russia. This theory was also born on Reddit, in 2015. ![]() High on the list is Finland, the country some believe lies between Russia and Sweden, and that allegedly fought a valiant rearguard action against Soviet invasion in the runup to the second world war.
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