It may be Turkey to you, but it will always be Byzantium to me.
And what if you made a date to meet someone in upper volta (hint, bring some consonants, if you're planning on visiting the capital), or in the aftershave hub of Asia, burma? Much room for hilarious misunderstanding.
I'll be in the corner, nursing my Mumbai Sapphire gin.
Like Istanbul, which was Constantinople. Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople. So if you have a date in Constantinople, she'll be waiting in Istanbul.
c_b: I had thought as well that Leningrad was called Stalingrad at one point. But when I looked it up, it seems it was actually Volgograd that made the change to Stalingrad and back.
The one that remains mysterious is Königsberg, famous in its day for Euler's celebrated "7 bridges" problem. This eventually became Kaliningrad; given its East Prussian location, one might have expected it to be one of the first to regain its original name. In fact, if Wikipedia is to be believed, it was briefly Russified as Kyonigsberg (Кёнигсберг), before being renamed to Kaliningrad (Калинингра́д).
I had assumed until recently that it belonged to one of the Baltic republics, but in fact it remains a Russian exclave, the so-called Kaliningrad oblast. A reminder of its strategic importance during the Cold War as one of the westernmost territories of the Soviet Union came as recently as July of this year, when Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov declared that if US-controlled missile defense systems were deployed in Poland that nuclear weapons may be deployed in Kaliningrad.
Earworm alert!
It was all your talk of Kaliningrad that threw off the giant computer brain. I hope you're pleased with yourself!
Even old New York was once New Amsterdam. Why they changed it, I can't say. People just liked it better that way.
Google's giant computer brain has decided that someone looking at 'hooverville' might also enjoy:
Russian river cruises.
Cool, we've tricked Google into thinking Hooverville is in Russia!
It may be Turkey to you, but it will always be Byzantium to me.
And what if you made a date to meet someone in upper volta (hint, bring some consonants, if you're planning on visiting the capital), or in the aftershave hub of Asia, burma? Much room for hilarious misunderstanding.
I'll be in the corner, nursing my Mumbai Sapphire gin.
That's nobody's business but the Turks.
Like Istanbul, which was Constantinople. Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople. So if you have a date in Constantinople, she'll be waiting in Istanbul.
c_b: I had thought as well that Leningrad was called Stalingrad at one point. But when I looked it up, it seems it was actually Volgograd that made the change to Stalingrad and back.
The one that remains mysterious is Königsberg, famous in its day for Euler's celebrated "7 bridges" problem. This eventually became Kaliningrad; given its East Prussian location, one might have expected it to be one of the first to regain its original name. In fact, if Wikipedia is to be believed, it was briefly Russified as Kyonigsberg (Кёнигсберг), before being renamed to Kaliningrad (Калинингра́д).
I had assumed until recently that it belonged to one of the Baltic republics, but in fact it remains a Russian exclave, the so-called Kaliningrad oblast. A reminder of its strategic importance during the Cold War as one of the westernmost territories of the Soviet Union came as recently as July of this year, when Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov declared that if US-controlled missile defense systems were deployed in Poland that nuclear weapons may be deployed in Kaliningrad.
I thought it was Leningrad that changed to Stalingrad? Also Peking to Beijing... but that didn't change back so... not like Peking to Beijing.
Kind of like Volgo-Stalin-Volgograd
For a while the Hoover Dam changed its name as well, because of Hoover's--shall we say--tarnished legacy, but now it's called Hoover Dam again.
Not be confused with "getting a Clinton", which ahem, is an adult concept.
After the eponymous President Hoover--a collection of shacks and huts at the edge of the city where unemployed people lived in the 1930s