With all the twists and turns in the world, many places we easily recognize today have actually been born with very different names. In some cases, name changes have occurred more than once.

One of the best-known cases is the present-day city of Istanbul, which was born as a Thracian city of Ancient Greece under the name of Byzantium and was renamed in the year 330 when Emperor Constantine I re-founded the city and renamed it Constantinople after himself. That was the city’s official name for 16 centuries until 1930 when it was re-named to Istanbul .

Let’s see some other cases …

In 1524, an Italian explorer in the service of the French crown, Giovanni da Verrazzano, arrived in the Indian region of the Lenape in North America and called it New Angoulême (French: Nouvelle-Angoulême). A century later, this region was inhabited by Dutch settlers who called the settlement New Amsterdam. Some years later, in 1664, after an armed conflict, the English seized the city and renamed it New York, as we know it to this day.

Colombia was formerly called New Granada, until Simón Bolívar suggested the present name, derived from the name of Christopher Columbus in 1818.

The capital of Norway, regained its original name after many centuries. It was known as Oslo until 1624 when a large fire destroyed much of the medieval city. King Christian IV of Denmark and Norway, decided to re-found it with the name of Cristiania and later Kristiania. Three centuries later, the original name of Oslo was recovered with a decree on July 11, 1924.

Present-day Tokyo was called Edo from when the city was founded until 1868 when the Meiji Restoration happened.

With the fall of Tenochtitlán, Spanish settlers started building their new territory, which they called New Spain. This was the name of present-day Mexico (and the other neighboring territories). Back then, the Spanish empire encompassed territories across North America, Central America, Asia and Oceania, and existed from 1535 until 1821.

In 1644 the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman named an island in the pacific with the name of New Holland. The name was changed to Australia in 1824.

The name of Upper Volta (French: Haute-Volta) may not ring a bell at all if you aren’t familiar with African history. This was the name of the territories colonized by France on the African continent from 1919 to 1958, which were renamed to the Republic of Upper Volta (French: République de Haute-Volta). Shortly after, in 1960, this territory becomes totally independent of France and adopts the name of Burkina Faso.

Wars, invasions, agreements, conflicts and treaties have brought about many changes throughout history, … but let’s leave those for a next article.