Where is Yalta?, you may be wondering, if you just finished reading The Master and Margarita, and need to know just how unlikely it is for a person to be in Moscow one minute and Yalta the next, and your knowledge of the region’s geography is limited to the fact that St. Petersburg used to be Leningrad (used to be Petrograd used to be St. Petersburg) and some unexplored fondness for the phrase “former Soviet state.”
Yalta is in the Ukraine. Google Maps can’t give me directions between Moscow and Yalta, which implies that either the two are, indeed, difficult to travel between or that Google Maps knows as much about (post-Soviet) geography as I do.
By the way, Glocca Morra is supposedly fictitious (it’d be in Ireland if it existed), but in searching for information about it I discovered that there is a genre of “adult entertainment” called Lepreporn. I won’t go into details; what you’re imagining is probably much more interesting.
Other great place names (toponyms):
Massapequa
Adirondacks
Poughkeepsie
Patagonia
Delaware
Abyssinia
Bethesda