Curated playlist
Former national capitals
- Cebu CityFerdinand Magellan landed in Cebu in 1521 and was welcomed by Rajah Humabon.
- ColchesterColchester only became an official city in 2022. Its Roman walls had stood for nearly two thousand years.
- Nizhny NovgorodNizhny Novgorod means Lower Newtown, yet it sits higher than Veliky Novgorod. Lower refers to being downstream.
- TurinTurin drove Italian unification, then lost the capital twice. It went to Florence in 1865, then Rome by 1870.
- YangonThe city of Yangon has a name meaning "End of Strife." It has seen conquest, war, dictatorship, cyclone and protest.
- BonnBonn lost its role as Germany's capital, yet still keeps about one-third of ministerial jobs as of 2019.
- MdinaMdina, once the capital of Malta, has a population of just 250 people. It is nicknamed the Silent City.
- LagosLagos has no single city government, despite being Africa's largest urban area. The state runs roads, power and water.
- WuhanA bomb that went off too early in Wuchang in 1911 set off the fall of dynastic rule. The city is now called Wuhan.
- AarauAarau was the first capital of a unified Switzerland. The town held that role for less than six months in 1798.
- MelbourneMelbourne spent 262 days in COVID-19 lockdown, the most of any city in the world.
- ValenciaAfter a deadly 1957 flood, Valencia moved its river and turned the dry bed into a park.
- SamarkandSamarkand was destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1220, yet Marco Polo later called it splendid.
- Saint PetersburgIn 1703, Peter the Great laid Saint Petersburg's founding stone on an island just taken from Sweden.
- CamulodunumCamulodunum, Rome's first capital in Britain, burned in one night and came back larger. It survives today as Colchester.
- NicomediaNicomedia began as a Greek colony named for a lobster. It later became an eastern capital of Rome.
- KolkataKolkata, known as Calcutta until its official name changed in 2001, is a city whose founder a court refused to name. In 2003, answering a public petition, the Calcutta High Court ruled that the city does not have a founder at all. That is…
- HyderabadHyderabad began as an answer to a water problem. In 1591 the Qutb Shahi ruler Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah founded a new city on the banks of the Musi River, because the fortress capital of Golconda kept running short of water. Today Hyderabad…
- RoskildeIn 1370, the city of Roskilde owned 2,600 farms spread across the island of Zealand. That is the landholding of a great power, not of a country town. Today Roskilde has 53,354 residents and lies 30 km west of Copenhagen, close enough that…