Maidan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maidān is the term for any open plain, park or square near a town in Persian, Arabic, Turkish and several Indian languages. In Western Ukrainian dialects maidan is a square inside a city or town. The ultimate source of the word is Arabic maydān.^[1]

• Maidan (Isfahan) - the great royal square of Isfahan, a world heritage site.
• Maidan (Kolkata) - the Maidan park in Kolkata
• Maidan (Karnataka) - an unofficial region of Karnataka state of southern India, on the Deccan plateau
• Midan Tahrir (Tahrir Square) is a large public square at the epicentre of modern Cairo, Egypt.
• Meydan simply means an open square in Turkish.
  • Taksim Square (Turkish: Taksim Meydanı) is a square situated in the European part of Istanbul, Turkey.
• Maidan (Ukrainian: Майдан) is a meeting or gathering place, market place, forum, etc., or simply "area."
  • Maidan Nezalezhnosti - Independence Square is the central square of Kiev best known for mass protests during the Orange Revolution.
  • Maidan (forum) - a Ukrainian political activism Internet forum
• Mäydan/Мәйдан is a square and area in Tatar language and also the place of Sabantuy.
• Maydan, Kyrgyzstan, a town in Kyrgyzstan
• The term "Maidan" is also applied to one of the valleys in the Afridi country of Tirah in Pakistan
• In Russian prison slang, a "maidan" (майдан) is a large duffel bag in which a prisoner carries all his belongings when he is shipped from one institution to another. By extrapolation, this term also applies to the ubiquitous large plaid duffel bags in which Russian "shop tourists" bring home goods from trips abroad for subsequent resale.

The Ukrainian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet, and the letter й may be transliterated into an I, Y, or J, depending on the transliteration system in use, hence majdan or maidan.

Majdan is also a common location name found in Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Ukraine, for example, Majdanek.

In the novel "Flashman in the Great Game" by George MacDonald Fraser, the term is used frequently to refer to the parade grounds at British military camps in colonial India. It is also on page 68 of Flashman - The Flashman Papers 1839-1842 and definitely refers to the parade grounds.

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