Public memory and political street names in Košice: Slovakia's multiethnic second city

Abstract

Many studies have demonstrated how street names have been utilized by political elites as a tool for communicating national histories and hegemonic state ideologies with the end goal of affecting public memory in a way that legitimizes the political order. Recent scholarship in the realm of public memory has shown that it is a negotiated, dialectic process by which elites attempt to gain acceptance for the sociopolitical order of the day through various means like street naming and in which everyday people react to such coercion in complex ways. However, not enough attention has been paid to the fact that nationalist movements have qualitatively different ideological goals and geographic scales in mind when reorienting city texts compared with those of communist regimes, whose task is much more difficult. This paper uses the city of Košice, Slovakia to examine political street renaming and vernacular responses to nationalist and communist periods of odonymic change and their unique results.