Addicted to change: Renaming Streets in Balkans

The battle over renaming streets in Eastern Europe since the fall of communism reflects their importance as symbols of identity, history and power.

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What’s in a name? More than you might think, especially when it comes to streets, which is why analysis of their names is a revealing exercise.

Whilst in east Berlin, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many street names remain unchanged, monuments to almost 50 years of communism, most countries in the Balkans have rushed to rid themselves of these outward signs of their socialist baggage.

In Bucharest, where once you might have marched down Victory of Socialism Boulevard, you can now take a stroll along Unity Boulevard.

In Serbia, however, things are moving full circle. There are calls in Belgrade for streets renamed after Belgrade’s Soviet liberators in the 1940s, and which reverted in the 1990s to their pre-revolutionary names, to revert once more to remember Lenin, the Red Army and Soviet military leaders.

Albania, a country which, perhaps more than any other Balkan nation, suffered under the communist yoke, has no such issues; the majority of Tirana’s streets have never been named at all.


Control, alter, delete

The existence of a street is not limited to a simple plate, indicating its name, or to the graphics by which it is represented by a GPS system. “Street names,” says Iulian Puiu, a graphic designer in Bucharest, “have almost the same function as branding: they tell a story about a place, city or country.”

Research into around 20,000 street names in the Balkan countries and Germany tells us a lot about the character of their respective people and their history.

Read the article in Romanian

This article was produced as part of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, an initiative of the Robert Bosch Stiftung and ERSTE Foundation, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN.