An ideological perspective on street names: Socialist political symbols in the post-socialist City of NIŠ

Abstract

The topic of this paper is the ideological perspective on the names of city streets in a post-socialist context. Studies of post-socialist cities have indicated that the symbolic deconstruction of the socialist identity was an important part of the legitimization of new elites. Renaming the streets of the cities of Serbia was also a segment in the process of the symbolic revision of the past, with aim to erase the memory of the Yugoslav and anti-fascist tradition. What is interesting, however, is that the opposite ideological contexts during the post-socialist period in this region formed a specific, ambivalent cultural memory, and so despite the renaming, anti-fascist and socialist symbols in the street names have remained in great numbers. The final outcome of the policy of renaming is a city text which reflects the ideologically heterogenous image of socialism and anti-fascism on the one hand, and the retraditionalizationist, nationalist currents on the other. The paper presents a case study of the City of Niš with the aim of presenting the historical-ideological portrait of the city by analyzing 1355 street names. The main source of data for this study is publication based on the official data from relevant city institutions.