Can You Solve This Old-Timey Riddle? #21

“The Windsor Enigma” was the name given to an acrostic puzzle said to have been written by Queen Victoria for her children.

Unfortunately, the puzzle is a little too of its time to be readily solvable today—but if you still want to give it a go, take the first letter of “A city in Italy, a river in Germany, a town in the United States, a town in North America, a town in Holland, the Turkish name for Constantinople, a town in Bothnia [modern-day Finland], a city in Greece, [and] a circle on the globe,” and use those nine letters to spell out the name of a town in England. So long as you’ve chosen the right ones, the last letter of each of those answers, read in reverse from last to first, will also spell out what the town in question is (or at least, was at the time) most famous for.

(The answer, should you have tried to solve it, is NEWCASTLE and COAL MINES—spelled out by Naples, Elbe, Washington, Cincinnati, Amsterdam, Stamboul, Torneå, Lepanto, and Ecliptic.)

The Windsor Enigma might be a bit beyond us in the 21st century, but happily, the author who had the foresight to record it, Charlotte Eliza Capel, published dozens more like it in an 1861 collection called Victorian Enigmas. The puzzle below is one of hers: What country is spelled out by the first letter of the names and words that fit each of these four clues? (Given that there are only a few four-letter countries in the world, you might not need all the answers to solve it … )

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