Egopolis / Real Life

Examples of Real Life Egopolises.

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Note: This list excludes examples where the place is named or renamed against a subject's wishes, or long after their deaths, such as Washington DC and the state of Washington, after George Washington.

Multiple continents

• Alexander the Great was a serial offender. There were about a dozen cities named Alexandria, with the odd Alexandropolis and Alexandretta thrown in. Some of them were given translations of his name to the local languages, such as Kandahar in what's now Afghanistan (the similarity between Alexandria, Egypt, and Kandahar, Afghanistan becomes more apparent given Alexandria's name in Arabic—Iskandariya, as the name Alexander is rendered Iskander in Arabic and Sikunder in Pashtu.). When he was feeling really creative, he named one city Bucephala, after his horse, Bucephalus. The generals who took over his domains often named cities after themselves, like Antiocheia (now Antakya) for Antiochos and Seleukeia for Seleukos. (There are actually several Antiochs scattered about.)
  • He founded almost all of those cities rather than renaming them from something else—or to be precise, he expanded certain existing settlements so much that it probably should count as a new foundation. This wasn't a vanity project: he needed somewhere to house the large numbers of of Greek veterans and civilians that followed his conquests. A prime example is the one in Egypt (by far the largest, most famous, and most successful of the lot): there was a reasonably sized fishing town and port city called Rakote on the site, but Alexander ordered the construction of a large, planned Greek-style city in the area around the town to serve as the center of the Greek community in Egypt and to attract more trade. The result was that Rakote became the Egyptian quarter of Alexandria, a bustling multiethnic port/metropolis/royal capital.
  • Histeria! once had a sketch with Toast asking for "directions to Alexandria," with him answering each set with a "No, not that Alexandria."
  • As did a sketch in Horrible Histories, where Alexander decides to name a new city of his Alexandria and his advisor reminds him of all the other Alexandrias he'd founded and suggests against it. Alex concedes the point and instead names it Iskenderun, because it's Turkish for Alexandria.
  • Alexander was really only following in family tradition. His father, Philip II, named and re-named cities after himself too - most prominently Philippi on the site of the conquered city of Crenides (later sometimes known as Crenides-Philippi).
  • Philippopolis (literally Philip's City) was another ancient city founded by Philip II, now called Plovdiv and located in Bulgaria.
• The Czech entrepreneur Tomáš Baťa founded several towns around the world, naming them after himself (Batawa in Ontario, Batadorp in the Netherlands, Batapur in Pakistan, Batanagar and Bataganj in India...) and centering them on his shoe factories. His half-brother Jan Antonín also founded Batatuba, Batayporã and Bataguassu in Brazil.
• Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa and one of the largest in the world, was named for Queen Victoria by British explorer John Hanning Speke in 1858, during her reign.
  • There are other places around the former British Empire that were founded and named after her during her reign, such as Victoria, the capital of British Columbia (1843); and Victoria state in Australia (original colony formed in 1851); and the City of Victoria, the chief city of Hong Kong Island, named in 1843.
• Plenty of places around the world are named for someone now forgotten; we don't know anything about Occa, for example, except that he lived by a ford (Oxford).
  • In fact, a fair bit of English toponymy – not so much in Wales, Ireland north or south, or Scotland – is this. There are plenty of "place of So-and-So's People" names: both Gillinghams, Wokingham, Hastings, and the like, for Gylla and Gilla and Wocca and Haesta and their followers. There are a fair few place-names which incorporate an element of official, of ex officio, ownership or overlordship: Compton Abbas (the Abbot's or local Abbey's Compton), the obvious Bishop's Stortford, Earls Barton (owned by the Earl of Northampton and then by successive Earls of Huntingdon), Princes Risborough (held by the Black Prince), Tettenhall Regis (held by the Crown directly), Collingbourne Ducis (owned by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster), and so on. And then there are those named directly for their lords: Compton Beauchamp, Huish Champflower (the Bishop's Huish was and is Huish Episcopi), Ewyas Lacy, Ewyas Harold (and, indirectly, Teffont Evias, two counties away, which shared a lord with the latter but took its suffix from the other estate's place-name and not the lord), Sutton Waldron, Sutton Valence, Sutton Courtenay, Wooton Courtenay.... Apparently, after ten or so centuries, the actual egotism ceases to operate in accordance with the trope.

Europe

• Subverted with Emperor Hadrian, who traveled throughout the entire Roman Empire, commissioning buildings and civil works projects wherever he went. Many of those cities renamed themselves Hadrianopolis in order to enjoy the emperor's favor. With one exception, Aelia Capitolina, named for his gens of Aelius and built on the ruins of Jerusalem, which had been burned down 60 years earlier.
  • Antinoopolis was actually founded in memory of Hadrian's gay lover Antinous.
• The Russian cities St. Petersburg (originally named by Peter the Great not for himself, but for the saint that was his namesake) was renamed Petrograd (during WWI because it sounded too German), then Leningrad (five days after Lenin's death to elevate Lenin as Our Founder). After the end of Cold War, it was renamed St. Petersburg again;^note Famous Russian joke from Soviet times: An old Jew was at some state office, where a bureaucrat was asking him questions for some paperwork. The official asked him, "Where do you live?", to which he replied, "Leningrad." "Where were you born?" "St. Petersburg." "Where did you go to school?" "Petrograd." And then, menacingly, "Where would you like to live?" "St. Petersburg." Now even more Hilarious in Hindsight.. Then there's Stalingrad (now Volgograd, formerly Tsaritsyn). There's a move to rename it back to Stalingrad, not in honour of Stalin but in honour of the famous victory over Germany, which coupled with the awful Siege of Leningrad has ensured that these renamings endured in global consciousness.
  • Volgograd is a very weird subversion, since Leon Trotsky put in his autobiography that Joseph Stalin was very ambitious and insistent on capturing the city (then called Tsaritsyn, but the name comes from the Tatar language and is not etymologically related to the Russian word 'Tsar') during the Civil War instead of obeying his orders and helping other regiments. It was only after Lenin's death that he managed to rename the city into Stalingrad (possibly as a Monument of Humiliation and Defeat against his old rival). After the de-stalinization process in the 50s, the city was finally renamed Volgograd.
  • There were proposals by Soviet citizens in 1930s that Moscow itself be renamed Stalinodar in honor of the man, but seeing it as going too far, Stalin rejected the proposal and earlier actually banned further renaming of cities after him.
  • After Lenin's death, the city of Simbirsk (where he was born) was renamed Ulianovsk, after Lenin's original name, and in fact the regional district there (the oblast in Russian) still goes by that name.
    • Likewise, the dacha where he died was renamed from simply Gorky to Gorky Leninskiye.
  • Königsberg had a double strike against it when the Soviets took over. It had a German name which translated as the King's City. So it was renamed Kaliningrad after the recently deceased Soviet official Mikhail Kalinin. The city of Tver was also renamed Kalinin but was changed back to its original name in 1990. That said, the city (which is the westernmost in Russia, being an exclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania) is one of the more Westernized cities in the country, and it's common for people from the city to call it "Kyonig" (a shortened, Russified form of the German name). There have been proposal to rename the city as "Kantgrad" after Immanuel Kant, who was born and lived in the city.
  • Nizhny Novgorod was named Gorky from 1932 until 1990, after Soviet writer and revolutionary activist Maxim Gorky, who was born there. He died in 1936, so it was named such while he was still living.
    • The rename famously did not affect the major automobile company there, which although it started as Nizhegorodsky Avtomobilny Zavod (Nizhny Novgorod Automobile Factory, or NNAZ for short) it remains to this day Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod (Gorky Automobile Factory, GAZ for short), on account of developing a punning association with gazelles along the way. (Even Communists aren't immune from branding.)
  • Yekaterinburg was named for Empress Catherine I (Peter the Great's wife, not to be confused with Catherine the Great (II)) in 1723. It was renamed Sverdlovsk from 1924-1991, after Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov, who played a key role in ordering the execution of the Romanovs who happened to have been exiled in the city when they were executed. This renaming was posthumous and definitely intended to taunt the White Army and it was subsequently renamed back to Yekaterinburg after the Cold War.
  • An example featuring repeated Please Select New City Name: In 1869, a Welsh fellow named Hughes established a mining and factory town on the Seversky Donets River in modern-day Ukraine, which was named Yuzivka in his honour; this city grew and grew and eventually became a major industrial hub. After the Red October, it was seen as unfit to have a foreign capitalist's name on a major city like this, so the name was changed in 1923-24 (some say it was briefly Trotsk, after Trotsky, in late 1923), first to Stalin and then to Stalino (in the late 20s or early 30s; it's not clear). Finally, in 1961 (after Stalin's death and denunciation), the city was given its current name, Donetsk, after the river.
  • Another repeat example was the city of Yekaterinoslav in central Ukraine. Founded by and named for Catherine the Great, after the revolution, it was renamed to Dnipropetrovsk, after high-ranking Bolshevik Grigory Petrovsky. After Ukraine’s independence, there was some trepidation around the name, especially since Petrovsky was involved in policies that contributed to the Holodomor (Ukraine’s horrific man-made famine in the 1930s). However, as Catherine the Great was also known for her anti-Ukrainian policies, simply reverting the name wasn’t an acceptable solution, and the renaming was also opposed by pro-Russian politicians (who often had nostalgia for the Soviet Union). After the Russian invasion in 2014 led to a definitive anti-Russian and anti-Soviet backlash in Ukraine, the city was finally renamed to Dnipro in 2016, after the river that runs through the city.
• After Emperor Alexander I conquered Finland from Sweden, he relocated the capital further east (from Turku to Helsinki) and renamed the main street. Because his rule was seen as an improvement (and then that of his nephew Alexander II even more so), the Finns kept the name. The street, Aleksanterinkatu, is one of Helsinki's most important shopping streets, and the Helsinki Cathedral and statue of Alexander II are located on it.
• The German city of Salzgitter in Lower Saxony receive the title of Hermann Göring-Stadt due to the industrial and mining areas built there (Goering was in charge of Nazi Germany's economic development, and ran a huge industrial company, the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, based in the town; the company still exists under the name Salzgitter AG) and the Polish city of Zamość into Himmlerstadt (after Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and The Gestapo). The "Himmlerstadt" name was invoked by a Canadian war bond drive as part of a larger mock Day of the Jackboot in Winnipeg.
• Byzantium was originally named after a king named Byzas.
  • The Roman city built on the same site is in fact an aversion. Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus dubbed his new imperial capital Nova Roma (Latin) or Nea Rhome (Greek), it is just that everybody else insisted on calling the place Constantinople and variants of the latter name stuck until the 20th century.
• Roman Emperor Commodus, the bad guy from ''Gladiator" was a serial offender. He renamed Rome, the months (every month^note That doesn't mean he named every month "Commodus"; he had many names), the legions, the Senate and even the Roman people after himself. Rome became Commodiana, the Names of the 12 Months was organized around his names and titles ^note Lucius, Aelius, Aurelius, Commodus, Augustus, Herculeus, Romanus, Exsuperatorius, Amazonius, Invictus, Felix, Pius. The legions were renamed Commodianae, Commodian Fortunate Senate, his palace and the Roman people themselves were all given the name Commodianus.
  • The Senate later had him assassinated and renamed everything back. Interestingly there are very few contemporary records of Commodus' reign, which suggests not so much conspiracy as an urge to wash away bad memories. And no, the use of the word "commode" as referring to a toilet is NOT one of Commodus's legacies.
• According to legend, Rome was an example, with Romulus, but in reality, it's probably the other way around; Romulus and Remus were mythical characters who were likely named after Rome.
• If Suetonius is to be believed, Nero wanted to rename Rome "Neropolis" and replace the Olympic Games with an identical competition called the "Neronia".
• King Wilhelm I of Prussia named Wilhelmshaven after himself.
  • Similarly, Ludwigshafen am Rhein was named after King Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1844. His dad lost the big port city and former Electoral Palatine capital across the river when the German borders got redrawn so....
• Non-geographic example: Roman emperors Julius Caesar and Augustus got their names added to the Julian Calendar as months (July and August), replacing the previous names (Quintilis and Sextilis respectively).^note Contrary to popular belief, they did not add new months, thereby "explaining" why September, October, November, and December seem to say "seventh month, eighth month, ninth month, tenth month" when they are months 9, 10, 11, and 12; rather, the Romans changed their New Year from 1 March to 1 January sometime around the beginning of the second century BC—about 100-150 years before Caesar. The beginning of the civil year—when the term of the consul began—was made 1 January no later than 153 BC; many historians argue this appears to reflect a previous change in the reckoning of New Year's festivities for social and religious purposes at least a generation earlier, but other historians point to other evidence that the festival and social New Year was moved to 1 January after the consular New Year did. As for why the consuls took office in January, there are two theories: (1) It was considered auspicious because the month was named after Janus, the god of transitions and beginnings, or (2) It gave the consuls, whose main job was leading armies in war, two or three months to get used to their new positions before campaign season began in the spring. (It also gave consuls an opportunity to enact whatever domestic agenda they had run on, capitalizing on their electoral mandate while it was still fresh and before having to spend months at war.) Some records indicate that the Romans did at some point have a ten-month calendar, and that January and February were added to the end of the year to get it to line up better, but all of those records claim that was the work of the semi-legendary second King of Rome Numa Pompilius in the seventh century BC. Subsequent Roman emperors tried to do the same, renaming other months after themselves (and sometimes after previous emperors as well), but no other changes lasted beyond their deaths.
  • There is a reason for this: Julius Caesar had actually carried out a much-needed reform of the calendar: the Roman calendar was originally lunisolar and relied on intercalary months to stay in alignment with the seasons. However, the Romans did not use a mathematical formula to add the intercalary month; instead, a religious official, the Pontifex Maximus (High Priest, basically), would announce the intercalary month whenever he determined the calendar and the seasons had gotten too misaligned. So far, so good; many ancient peoples with lunisolar calendars did it that way and their calendars worked just fine—the Jews did the same thing at the time and didn't have serious timekeeping problems.^note The mathematical system used in today's Hebrew calendar appeared around the second or third century AD, largely because the Romans had forced the Jews out of Israel and dispersed the central priesthood that could make the announcement.
    
    However, in Republican Rome, the Pontifex Maximus was usually a powerful politician. Indeed, during the mid-to-late Republic, the position was popularly elected through the Tribal Assembly (the voting method used to elect quaestors and curule aediles). Even before then, when the Pontifex Maximus was elected by the College of Pontiffs, the Pontifex Maximus was unofficially required to be a senator, which usually meant someone with a substantial political career.
    
    This created two problems: (1) Under Roman law, the Pontifex Maximus had to be physically in Rome to announce the new month, but powerful politicians generally took governorships in far-off provinces, keeping them away from Rome for years at a time. This was a significant issue, as the intercalary month needed to be added every 2-3 years (a lunar year being about 11 days shorter than a solar one). (2) Being a powerful politician, the Pontifex Maximus could—and did—mess with the announcement of the intercalary month to reward his allies with extra time in power or harm his enemies by holding off on the announcement until after their terms were over. Caesar himself held the post of Pontifex Maximus for most of his career, and provides prime examples of both problems: he spent the better part of twenty years outside Rome, first as governor of Transalpine Gaul in his (successful) campaign to conquer all Gaul for Rome (as related on his famous Commentaries on the Gallic War), and then in his civil war against the Pompeians. While he actually was in Rome, he had been quite aggressive with his calendrical powers.^note He had also used his intimate knowledge of the calendar to his military advantage during the civil war—at one point, he undertook a crossing of the Adriatic in January he (correctly) believed the Pompeian commander (his former co-consul Bibulus, who hated his guts) thought was impossible (the Adriatic is very rough in the winter), but which he knew that when you corrected for the missed intercalary months, the weather would be more like October and the crossing, while risky, was doable. By the time Caesar's civil war wrapped up, the calendar was completely out of whack.
    
    Thus when Caesar was settled back in Rome (and thus able to announce the new months) and had absolute power (and thus no longer felt the need to mess with the calendar for political reasons) he set himself to putting the calendar on a more consistent footing. He took some ideas he had picked up from astronomers, mathematicians, and so on, and combined them with a concept he had picked up in Egypt (the idea of a purely solar calendar, in which the months were not tied to the phases of the moon), and produced the new calendar. He also renamed his birth month "Quintilis" to "Julius" so people wouldn't forget who had fixed the calendar (never mind that he had a hand in messing it up in the first place after 19 years as Pontifex Maximus)—and of course, to satisfy his massive ego and solidify his deification. He was also personally extremely popular, so nobody really minded his taking the name of a month.
    
    As for August, Augustus was, well, Augustus: he knew how to make changes stick. Also, a few years after he took the title of Pontifex Maximus, he realized that the guy who had held that title between Julius Caesar and him (Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, former triumvir with Mark Antony and Augustus himself) hadn't understood the reform, and had been adding leap years every three years, by counting inclusively (what we today call a fence post error); Augustus rescued the calendar by skipping the next few leap years, so as to get the calendar back on track.
  • Of course, this doesn't mean that just because you fix the calendar, you'll get a month named after you. When Pope Gregory XIII made the most recent fix to the Western calendar in the 16th century, they didn't name a month "Gregorius" (or whatever) after him, as by that point the names were pretty much set in stone. Also Gregory needed to sell his reform not only to Catholic Europe (which only half-trusted him) but also to the Protestants (who trusted him not at all); putting a month named after himself would've undermined his purpose. That said, the calendar itself is still called the "Gregorian" to this day.
• Mary of Hungary christened Mariembourg after herself when she was governor of the Netherlands.
• Vaasa, Finland was originally named after the Vasa dynasty of Sweden. It was renamed 1855 as Nikolainkaupunki (Town of Nikolai) after Czar Nicholas I of Russia, who provided funds from his own account to rebuild the town after it had been devastated by a fire. It was re-renamed Vaasa c. 1918, when Finland became independent.
  • Maarianhamina (Mariehamn), capital of Åland Archipelago, was named after his wife, Empress Maria.
• There have been quite a few places named for Josip Broz Tito; Wikipedia has a list. Notably, however, every city named for him in the Yugoslav era got renamed to something else after the country broke up. Which happened rather rapidly after his death.
  • In 1949 in former Czechoslovakia the town of Zlín was renamed to Gottwaldov after the first communist (or, using terminology of the day, "worker") president Klement Gottwald. It was changed back immediately after the Velvet Revolution.
• Liechtenstein is another nation named after its ruling family. Similarly to Saudi Arabia, it is composed of two territories with preexisting names (the Lordship of Vaduz and the County of Schellenburg).
• Norway under Danish rule had to cope with at least three examples of this:
  • King Christian IV named two cities after himself: Kristiansand, and Christiania. The latter doubles as Oslo, but Christian decided to move the entire town across the bay, and then rename it after himself. It was later renamed Oslo. He also founded Kongsberg (King's mountain). This name is more of a claim, as the mountain was rich with silver, and the king wanted the undisputed right to prospect there. Thus "the mountain of the king".
  • His father, Frederik II, did the same thing. The older city of Sarpsborg wasn't safe enough, so he built Fredrikstad someway downriver.
  • Christian V founded and named Kristiansund after himself. The Norwegians stuck with the names, lacking better alternatives. Oslo was named back, and there is still a debate over Kristiansund. Fredrikstad stands, and so does Kristiansand.
• In Finland: Kristiinankaupunki (Queen Christina), Maarianhamina (Empress Maria Feodorovna) and Loviisa (queen Lovisa Ulrika). Kaarina is a subversion - the town has been named after St. Catherine, not any regent. Towns Hamina (Fredsikshamn in Swedish, after King Fredrik I) and Vaasa (after the royal family of Vasa) could well qualify.
• When English Royal Astronomer William Herschel first discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, he wanted to name it Georgium Sidus (George's Star) after his patron King George III. Other astronomers eventually persuaded him to follow the mythological convention for planet names, and it was named Uranus, the Romanized name of the Greek God of the Sky Ouranos.
  • Ironically, the French wanted to name it Herschel.
• For his Vanity Project Playtime, Jacques Tati actually built a fully functioning city called "Tativille". It had houses, buildings, apartments, and businesses that all had electricity, plumbing, elevators and lighting. Tati envisioned the location as a place where future filmmakers could shoot their films, ignoring his producers' more practical advice of simply buying a cheaper plot of land in an equally nice location and selling it back to developers once filming was complete. The plan was scuttled once the film bombed, Tati was forced into bankruptcy and the land was destroyed to make way for the Dumba freeway system.
• The city of Barcelona in Spain may be an example: One popular legend about the name's origin is that it was founded by a Carthaginian general named Hamilcar Barca (father of the rather more famous Hannibal Barca) as Barcino before the Second Punic War.
• As with other countries where communists took power after WWII, Bulgaria's authorities renamed many towns after local communist figures. The city of Varna was an exception, being named after Stalin. However, to avoid sounding too grandiose, the name couldn't be Stalingrad and instead became Grad Stalin (Town Stalin instead of Stalintown), effectively becoming Polis Ego. (Varna got its name back in 1956.)
• Subverted with the Italian city of Alessandria (that is Italian for "Alexandria"): born of the union of the towns of Gamondio, Marengo (yes, that Marengo) and Bergoglio (yes, almost certainly that Bergoglio^note His family was from that part of Italy before moving to Argentina, so the surname almost certainly refers to the now-absorbed town), it was named after then-reigning Pope Alexander III (Alessandro III in Italian) to remind the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa that the cities of Northern Italy were effectively independent, honor the guy who was weakening Barbarossa enough for them to stay independent in the face of Imperial military superiority, and because, Italians being Italians, acknowledging the union was effectively Bergoglio absorbing the two smaller towns would have broken the union (and Gamondio later returned its own town anyway). It was later briefly renamed Cesarea (after "Cesare", Italian for "Caesar" and another way to say "emperor") as a token act of subservience to the Holy Roman Empire after the Italians had won their effective independence, but the renaming didn't stick.
• Many names of Erzya settlements come from the names of the founders. The founder of Kildyuz Vele is Kildyuz, the founder of Vechkus Vele is Vechkus (“vele” in Erzya means “village”). There are even two villages with names derived from the name of Itsyal. The name "Orzamas" (or "Arzamas"; this is an Erzya city) comes from the Erzya name of the founder "Orzemas" according to one of the versions.

Asia

• During the Russian Imperialist and Soviet era, a lot of cities in Central Asia were built or renamed in honor of prominent (mostly European) figures.
  • In Kazakhstan:
    • Kyzylorda was founded as Fort-Perovsky in 1853 after its conqueror Count Vasily Perovsky. The name stuck until 1925.
    • Pavlodar was named in 1861 after Tsar Alexander II's then-newborn son, Grand Duke Paul.
    • Kostanay was called Nikolaevsk (after Tsar Nicholas II) from its founding until 1995.
    • Atyrau was known as Guryev, the name of its Russian founder, until 1991.
    • Taraz was renamed in honor of Armenian politician Levon Mirzoyan in 1936. When he fell out of Josef Stalin's favor and executed during the Great Purge, it was renamed after Kazakh singer Jambyl Jabayev. It finally settled on its old name in 1997.
    • The city where the Baikonur Cosmodrome sits on was officially called Leninsk from its founding to 1995. The popular name was taken from an unrelated city as a code to confuse foreigners from locating the site.
    • Aktau, formerly Shevchenko, after Ukraine's most famous poet.
    • The capital Astana was briefly renamed to Nur-Sultan following the 2019 resignation of the country's first and longest-serving president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who still retained significant political influence as head of the security council. However, in 2022, Nazarbayev fell out of favor with the current president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and, under the latter's orders, the city's name was reverted back to Astana.
  • In Kyrgyzstan:
    • The capital, Bishkek, was known as Frunze from 1926 to 1991 after Romanian-Russian Bolshevik Mikhail Frunze.
    • Karakol was renamed Przhevalsk in 1888 after then recently departed Polish-Russian geographer Nikolay Przhevalsky. The city's original name was restored in 1921, only to be renamed again by Stalin to celebrate Przhevalsky's centenary. It stayed that way until the Cold War ended.
  • Turkmenistan's capital Ashgabat was known as Poltoratsk (from Bolshevik leader Pavel Poltoratskiy) from 1919 to 1927.
  • In Tajikistan:
    • From 1929 to 1961, the capital Dushanbe was known as Stalinabad, taking Josef Stalin's last name with a Persian suffix for place names.
    • The second-largest city, Khujand, was called Leninabad from 1936 to 1991. The city has a longer history of being renamed in honor of rulers before that; it was founded as Cyropolis in the 5th century BC by Persian conqueror Cyrus the Great. When Alexander annexed the region in the 3rd century BC, he built a settlement near Cyropolis called Alexandria Eschate. The cities later merged to form Khujand.
• Saddam International Airport in Baghdad, now called Baghdad International Airport (BIAP) or Al Anbar Airport. And Saddam City, a region/suburb of Baghdad now renamed Sadr City (after the Shia cleric Muhammad Muhammad Sadeq al-Sadr, who was assassinated in 1999 almost certainly by Saddam's orders; most of the area's population is Shia). This renaming was championed by Sadr's son, Muqtada al-Sadr. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was arguably the most extreme example of this trope, a role later taken by Turkmenistan.
• Beijing was once named Khanbaliq, "city of the Khan", by Kublai Khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan. Neither of whom was really named "Khan". Even "Genghis Khan" is a title in its entirety^note It roughly translates to "Oceanic ruler", which should give you a pretty good indication as to his ambitions: his real name was Temujin.
• Herod the Great had a pleasure palace/small city created for himself and called it Herodium.
• Contrary to what people may think, Ho Chi Minh City is actually a subversion. The city was South Vietnam's capital, then named Saigon. However, once the North conquered the South in 1975, they renamed the city after their leader... who had died in 1969. The rename was less an egocentric move and more akin to taunting the South Vietnamese and America.
• Not necessarily a city example, but politicians in the Philippines are disproportionately fond of affixing their names (or failing that, their initials) to public works projects. It is very common to see street flyers or posters announcing things like "Road Renovation c/o Mayor X" or "This bridge is a project of Congressman Y"—often including the grinning faces of the politicians in question, and at least in some cases painting said projects with their own theme colours and logos based on said initials, e.g. "Let's Join Forces" for Cavite politician Luis Ferrer, the LJF backronym standing for Luis "Jon-Jon" Ferrer. It gets bad enough that at one point in the early 2010s, several members of Congress attempted to file a bill to rename EDSA, Manila's main highway, after the late president Cory Aquino, the central figure of popular anti-dictatorship protests that occurred on the said highway.
  • In fact just such a fate befell the Manila International Airport—it was named Ninoy Aquino International Airport after Cory Aquino was installed in power in the 1980s. (In its defence, the man for whom it was named—Cory's husband and perhaps the most iconic opponent of the then-in-power Marcos dictatorship—was shot dead at the airport itself, but today an increasing number of people are clamouring for the original name, not the least because of the deteriorating reputation that put the airport frequently in "worst airport in the world" lists, including collapsing ceilings, overcrowding, terminal fees, general decay, and, in the mid-2010s, a scandal involving planting bullets in passengers' bags as a form of extortion.^note The entire political family associated with the airport has also been largely discredited, rightly or wrongly, by Rightist elements convinced that the post-1986 political order did nothing or not enough to advance the country's economic progress, only making the rich richer and the poor poorer and doing nothing to combat widespread crime and corruption—this has some basis in fact, but the Aquinos were just one of many factors that kept the status quo that way. As of June 2022, with the Marcoses (the Aquinos' archenemies) fully back in power, people are now scrambling to rename the airport after dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., purely on the basis that he was president when the terminal where Ninoy was shot was built, in the early 1980s. Most Filipino Rightists aren't this extreme though; most of them seem fine with reverting to "Manila International Airport", the old, original, and arguably more politically-neutral name.)
  • Quezon City was planned to be the new capital for the Philippines after nearby Manila is deemed too vulnerable to naval attacks. President Manuel Quezon envisioned the new city to be populated by workers from the Manila suburbs; hence one of the Quezon City neighboorhoods was called Barrio Obrero or the Worker's Neighborhood. Originally, it was envisioned to be named Balintawak City, after the town where the Philippine Revolution is generally understood to have started, but Narciso Ramos and Eugenio Perez, both legislators, suggested that the new city be named after Quezon instead and the President agreed. It served as the capital of the Philippine during the regaining of independence in 1946 until 1975, when it returned to Manila.
  • The entire Philippines itself was named after the Spanish King Philip II—making it almost the only country in the world named for a foreign ruler. For the curious, attempts to change the name post-independence largely went nowhere due to struggles with finding a name everybody could agree on. When they finally found an acceptable name, "Malaysia", another country snatched it up first and the debate fizzled out.
• Seoul was almost going to be renamed to 'Unam' after a prominent scholar pointed out that since the name literally means 'capital city', it needs to be changed. The name in question, 'Unam', was an art name or pseudonym of the first president of South Korea, Syngman Rhee who was a liberator turned dictator. His cronies thought it was a great idea, but the scholar who proposed a name change and the opposition in the assembly fought hard to oppose the name change, until the dictator himself thought that it was a bit too much.
• Pyongyang in NorthKorea was almost close to naming its capital for its founding founder like the South's, in this case, Kim Il-Sung after his death in 1994. Other North Korean officials proposed that in the event that Korea is unified under the North, Pyongyang would named Kim Jong-il city instead, with Seoul as Kim Il-Sung City. In any case, neither option was taken seriously.
• Delhi is believed to be named after Dhillu, the king who had the city built in 50 BC.
• Tigran the Great of Armenia named about four cities "Tigranakert" during his reign. The ruins of Tigranakert of Artsakh are located in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
• Saudi Arabia is this applied to a whole country — it is named after its ruling dynasty. It would be like Britain being called Windsorland. Also, within Saudi Arabia, we have:
  • King Abdullah Economic City and King Khalid Military City.
    • It Makes Sense in Context. Saudi Arabia as such didn't exist until the Saud family conquered its territories. Before it was whatever Ibn Thistribe, Ibn Thattribe, and Ibn Theothertribe could hold amidst a desert so barren that ruling over territory was more like ruling the ocean than ruling cultivated land. Arabian princes of old counted their power in their herds and numbers of clients rather then their territory. So it's no surprise that "Saudi Arabia" just means "parts of Arabia ruled by the House of Saud". On the other hand, the territories did have names; most of the country is composed of the old territories of Hijaz (on the western coast, between the mountains and the Red Sea) and Najd (the central plateau), which contained virtually everything worth mentioning (what is today the eastern coast was very sparsely inhabited, with a few villages scattered here and there down the coast and nothing much between the sea and the plateau). "Hijaz and Najd" or "Najd and Hijaz" would be a perfectly acceptable name for the country, and indeed that's what Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud called it for the first six years after conquering Hijaz. He changed the name in 1932 to emphasize that he was running the country as one unit, rather than as two units in personal union.
• The Dutch New Guinean capital city of Hollandia was renamed Sukarnopura in 1964, shortly after the region received independence from Dutch rule and was given to Indonesia, whose then-President Sukarno had actively campaigned for the colony's integration to his country. While he probably meant well (as a way to legitimize native rule over the region), it's also a sign of just how far his authoritarianism had gotten, ever since he abolished the parliamentary democracy and instituted a one-man rule as part of the "Guided Democracy". After he met his downfall in a coup attempt in 1965, his successor Suharto renamed the city to Jayapura ("city of glory"), where it remains to this day.

Africa

• British imperialist Cecil Rhodes conquered a little patch of land (modern Zimbabwe and Zambia) in Southern Africa by slaughtering everyone who opposed his right to it, and promptly named it Rhodesia.
• Trope prevalent in the naming of the cities in the Belgian Congo:
  • Léopoldville from Leopold II
  • Stanleyville from Henry Morton Stanley
  • Coquilhatville from Camille Coquilhat
  • Elisabethville from the Queen Elisabeth
  • Baudouinville from the King Baudoin
  • Costermansville from Paul Costermans

The Americas

• Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo did this a lot, going as far as changing the capital city's name from Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo.
  • After he died, the province of Salcedo was renamed to Hermanas Mirabal. The Mirabal sisters had been murdered by Trujillo's men; Salcedo was their home province.
• The city of Rochester was founded by a trio of land speculators by the names of Charles Carroll, William Fitzhugh, and Nathaniel Rochester. No points for guessing which one got to name it. When some later accused him of vanity, Rochester defended his choice by claiming that if he'd named the city after Carroll or Fitzhugh, whichever of the two he didn't choose would have been angry with the one he did; therefore, he naturally went with the name that would make both men equally angry with him.
• Detroit's main street is named Woodward Avenue, supposedly meaning "toward the woods". However, it and many other streets in Detroit were given their names by Augustus Woodward, who was Chief Justice of the Michigan Territory at the time, and was responsible for redesigning the city after a big fire burned it down in 1805. (His grandiose scheme was ultimately not implemented for lack of funds and population, but not before five of his planned major avenues were built.)^note They are today Woodward, Jefferson, Grand River, Michigan, and Gratiot Avenues; Jefferson runs parallel to the Detroit River; Woodward is perpendicular to Jefferson and goes to Pontiac; Grand River and Michigan split the area between Woodward and West Jefferson into thirds, with Grand River running along an old Indian trail that leads to Lansing (the state capital), Grand Rapids (the second-largest city), and Muskegon, while Michigan Avenue ultimately takes you to Chicago; Gratiot Avenue bisects the area between Woodward and East Jefferson and goes to Mount Clemens (the seat of Macomb County, i.e. the city's northeastern suburbs) and Port Huron (where Lake Huron narrows into the St. Clair River and a major border crossing with Canada).
• Williamstown, Massachusetts and the college it contains, Williams College, are named after the same man, Ephraim Williams, who left his estates to Massachusetts in his will on the condition that they use them to build a school, and that the school and the town its in both be named after him. On top of this, the college's sports teams call themselves the Williams Ephs.
• Fordlândia, a prefabricated industrial town constructed in the Brazilian state of Pará. It was naturally founded by the founder and then president of the Ford motor company, Henry Ford. It was meant to be a industrial town where workers would grow and "harvest" rubber tree plants to make tires for Ford automobiles. Revolts, diseased trees, and ultimately the creation of a cheap synthetic rubber led to the abandonment of the failed project.
• During his dictatorship, François Duvalier (Papa Doc) renamed the town of Cabaret, Haiti, to Duvalierville and started a megalomaniacal construction project. It was never finished.
• Bolivia was named after Simón Bolívar during his lifetime due to his brief but critical role in winning the country's independence from Spain and in drafting its first constitution. Also named after him (after his death) are the Venezuelan state of Bolívar and the Colombian department of Bolívar.
• Colombia is so named after Christopher Columbus. Interestingly, it was Bolívar who named the country, who had a vision of the whole of northern South America as a single "Gran Colombia", but ultimately only the central part—known in colonial times as New Granada—kept the name.
• Subverted with Hoovervilles, shantytowns set up in the early stages of The Great Depression which gained their moniker because the residents felt President Herbert Hoover was responsible for their misery.
  • A modern take in Seattle is "Nickelsville", a semi-permanent homeless encampment (it changes places around the city every few months), named for Greg Nickels, a mayor who was known for his friendliness towards real estate developers that triggered steep increases in the city's average rent, as well as his ham-fisted handling of the WTO protests (part of the protests were about organizations like WTO making policies that benefited the corporate-owning class while making cities like Seattle too expensive for working-class people to live in).
• Vallejo, California, named for General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. The next city south is named Benicia after his wife, though the pronunciation (originally /be NI si a/) is usually anglicized (to /ben I sha/).
• Mexico is full of these:
  • Four Mexican states are named for heroes of the Mexican War of Independence: Guerrero, Hidalgo, Morelos, and Quintana Roo. These were all named well after the deaths of the heroes, but the first three were named while the men were still in living memory, or nearly so. Guerrero in particular was carved out in 1849 from the territory of four different states because they had been Vicente Guerrero's personal fiefdom, just eighteen years after his untimely death.
  • In many parts of Mexico, you'll find many small towns renamed after a president. Examples: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán, named for a president of the 1930s who was from the state) (formerly Melchor Ocampo, and before that it was called "Los Llanitos"^note the small plains or Hueytlaco^note from a Nahuatl word meaning "big place"), ; and Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (formerly San Miguel de Camargo), Tamaulipas. There were also streets, boulevards and even statues made to honor the presidents, which (while not made by the men themselves, but rather the guys who succeeded them) were made during their lifetimes. That being said, probably the most common presidential street name in Mexico—roughly equivalent to "Washington Street/Boulevard/Avenue" in Gringolandía—is "Calle/Bulevar/Via/Avenida Francisco I. Madero", pretty much all of which were named well after the end of the revolution the namesake president had started and been martyred for.
• The former British colony and present US state of Maryland is officially claimed to have been named after Queen Consort Mary (Henrietta Maria), wife of Charles I of England, in 1632 (during her reign), although The Other Wiki cites some historical claims that founder George Calvert actually named the colony after Mary the mother of Jesus.
• Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, was named after King James I in 1607 (during his reign). And Williamsburg, the famously preserved colonial village that was a one-time capital of Virginia Colony, used to be called Middle Plantation before it was renamed Williamsburg in 1699 after then-reigning King William III.
• The US state and former colony Georgia was named after King George II during his reign in 1732.
• Louisiana Territory, which once covered most of the vast Mississippi-Missouri watershed of North America and was also known as New France, was named for Louis XIV during his reign.
• North and South Carolina (and the city of Charleston, SC) were named after King Charles (both I and II—the first granted the original charter to a certain Lord Heath, the second re-granted it, after the monarchy was restored, to 8 of his loyal nobles as the original charter was deemed to have expired.) Charles in Latin is "Carolus," which accounts for the "Carolina," meaning Carolus' land.
• The city of Charlotte, NC, was named after Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III. The surrounding county, Mecklenburg, was named after the region of Germany where she originally came from.
• When King Charles II gave William Penn a sizeable land grant in North America, he named it Pennsylvania (meaning "Penn's Woods"); William Penn was actually embarrassed that the king named it after him, at which point the King explained that no, he wasn't naming it for Penn himself—whose Quakerism he disdained and whom he personally disliked—but rather for Penn's father, who had been a respected admiral in the Royal Navy who had helped Charles take back his throne, and had been an Anglican to boot (and to top it off, the land grant was in satisfaction of a debt the King owed to the elder Penn). Penn would have preferred either New Wales (because a lot of the settlers who planned to go were Welsh^note to this day, several towns west of Philadelphia have Welsh names, and the area is called the Welsh Tract) or Sylvania (again, because of the woods), but Charles II would not change the name of the grant.
• New York's (the city and the state) namesake is James Stuart, the Duke of York, and later, King James II. He was the Lord High Admiral when the Royal Navy captured New Amsterdam from the Dutch.
• When Michigan Territory was trying to become a state in the late 1820s and early 1830s, its legislature, seeking to curry favor with the present Administration, carved out ten counties named after Andrew Jackson and his Cabinet in south-central and southwestern Michigan: Jackson County (after the President), Calhoun County (after the Vice President, John C. Calhoun), Van Buren County (after then-Secretary of State, later Vice President, and then President Martin Van Buren), Livingston County (after Secretary of State Edward Livingston, who took the job after Van Buren became Veep), Ingham County (after Treasury Secretary Samuel Ingham), Eaton County (after Secretary of War John Eaton), Cass County (after Eaton's successor as Secretary of War Lewis Cass, although at the time the county was named he was Territorial Governor of Michigan), Branch County (after Navy Secretary John Branch), Berrien County (after Attorney General John Berrien), and Barry County (after the Postmaster General, William Barry). This plan didn't quite work—the President did not end up intervening in Michigan's favor in its border dispute with Ohio over Toledo—but to this day, these ten counties are called "Cabinet counties", and Jackson did end up signing the bill to make Michigan the 26th state as one of his last acts in office (in 1837).
• In Argentina, the provinces of El Chaco and La Pampa were for a time renamed Presidente Juan Perón and Eva Perón.
• Metapa, in Nicaragua, was renamed to Ciudad Darío (Darío City), in honor of the great poet Rubén Darío, who was born there.
• Jonestown, the Cult community founded in Guyana, was named after its leader Jim Jones ^note It also doubled as a pun on the name of Guyana's capital, Georgetown. It did not end well.
• When the Dutch established a colony in northern Brazil, its capital was named Mauritsstad (now Recife), after its founder and governor Prince John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen.

Oceania

• About half the geographic locations in New South Wales and Tasmania were named after NSW Governor Lachlan Macquarie, mostly by Macquarie himself.
• Melbourne, Australia was founded by a man called John Batman. For a while it was called Batmania, until it was officially renamed Melbourne (after Lord Melbourne, the British Prime Minister of the day) in 1836.
• Townsville, a city in the Australian state of Queensland (and not the setting of The Powerpuff Girls, just so we're clear), was founded by and named after Robert Towns.

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