KelvinD: This is getting rather off the VC 10 topic but my apologies for not reading your original post thoroughly. If you were in a RAF Britannia, then I have difficulty in believing that you flew over Armenia and Georgia, and I suspect that a very thick chinagraph had been used on that Pax Map. Flying from Bahrain or Sharjah, the CENTO route that I mentioned passed over Iran, up into eastern Turkey, and due west over the mountains until it was time to turn southwards for Cyprus. Overflight of Bulgaria would have been out of the question and there was no need for overflight of Greece. The same routing was used in reverse.
The 6-Day War did not help things in the area as rumours started and spread that RAF aircraft had flown from Cyprus in support of Israel. I was with an Argosy crew positioned at Masirah as standby support for a Lightning Trail to the Far East (Op Hydraulic) over those days, and I've often wondered whether the mix of Victor tankers and Lightnings operating through Akrotiri at the time might have helped spark those rumours.