The name Yezda Urfa comes from Yazd, Iran and Urfa, Turkey. We came across them while flipping through a dictionary while looking for a name for the band. Yazd was changed to Yezda to aid in pronunciation.
Many years later we even went so far as to change Urfa to Erfa because so many people were having trouble pronouncing Urfa. They always seemed to want to make the "u" long, as in "you-ref-a" or something like that!