Beyond the brochure

Beyond the Kingdom's borders, Syldavian history usually amounts to a few pages: those of the tourist brochure that Hergé reproduced in the album he drew from the affair of King Ottokar's Sceptre, in July 1938, and that the world has read ever since over the shoulder of the Belgian reporter Tintin. The other albums in which the Kingdom appears show it; that one alone recounts it.

That is where our history starts. These pages try to carry the account further.

Illuminated chronicle miniature within a painted border: a hilltop citadel flying a yellow banner with the Black Pelican, a hamlet burning below it, villagers fleeing downhill with bundles and driving sheep and goats, and a troop of horsemen in tall caps riding in from the right with lances and a drawn sabre, under a red banner
A Bordurian raid on the eastern marches, 14th century: the villages emptied and the herds driven off, beneath the citadel's Black Pelican. Illuminated chronicle, Royal Museum of National Memory.

Reigns have been re-dated where the sources allowed it, gaps closed, and several periods that were missing altogether have taken their place in the chronology: the eighty years of the Bordurian interregnum, with the men who took the crown by force and lost it the same way; the occupation of 1941 to 1945; and the mines of the Zmyhlpathes, from the silver veins worked in the Middle Ages to the pitchblende that Sprodj would put, a good deal later, to an altogether more celestial use.

The History section is published in Syldavian, English, French and Thai.

Thirty-eight years

Black and white photograph of a ceremony in a palace hall: the King in uniform and the Queen in a tiara seated on thrones beneath a banner bearing the crowned Black Pelican, a crown resting on a cushion beside them, Royal Guardsmen in plumed shakos flanking the dais, an official at the right reading a citation from a sheet of paper, and the recipient standing with his back to the camera at the foot of the steps, among guests in evening dress and fez
The conferral of the Order of the Golden Pelican on Tintin, the first foreigner to receive it, before King Muskar XII and Queen Milena at the Royal Palace of Klow, 1938. Period gelatin silver print, photographic archives of the Royal House.

The new page follows Muskar XII from the second son born in 1894, whom nothing at the time marked for the crown, to his death in 1975, the summer of the Helsinki Final Act. In between: the disputed succession of 1937, the Sceptre affair, the war and the occupation, Sprodj and the first rockets.

The Consulate is indebted to Mr Jonathan Fabry, whose Histoire de la Syldavie, de l'Antiquité à nos jours and study of King Ottokar's Sceptre, published by the Presses Universitaires de Klow in 2021, provided the chronological framework for this work, and to the colleagues of the Syldavian Consular Network who lent their help to it.

The illustrations come from the collections of the Royal Museum of National Memory, the University Archives of Sprodj, the photographic archives of the Royal House and the Royal Archives of Syldavia; items in the public domain are credited in their captions.

These pages remain a work in progress. Corrections, clarifications and further information are welcome.

— Office of the Consul, Bangkok