Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.5673/sip.63.2.6
Political Turning Points and Urban Memory: Changes in the Street Names of Osijek in the Twentieth Century
Barbara Balen
orcid.org/0009-0005-3934-4278
; Josip Juraj Strossmayer University, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department for Art History, Osijek, Croatia
Abstract
Street-name changes throughout the twentieth century offer a particularly clear lens through
which to examine political upheavals and ideological reconfigurations. Acts of naming and renaming
streets both reflect critical political turning points and constitute attempts to inscribe
hegemonic narratives into public space. In postsocialist contexts, the study of urban toponymy
is especially significant, as it reveals how successive regimes reconstruct urban identity through
the symbolic appropriation of space. While street-name changes in several major Croatian
cities (Zagreb, Split, Rijeka) have received scholarly attention, Osijek has thus far remained
largely absent from systematic analysis.
This article examines diachronic transformations of street nomenclature in the three oldest
districts of Osijek—Tvrđa (the Fortress), Upper Town, and Lower Town—across six major
political regimes of the twentieth century: the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the Kingdom
of Yugoslavia, the Independent State of Croatia, the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia,
the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and the Republic of Croatia. Drawing on digitised
archival cartographic sources from the State Archives in Osijek and employing spatialanalytical
GIS methods, the study offers a fine-grained analysis of naming practices over time.
The findings demonstrate that street-name changes were most pronounced during periods
of political and ideological rupture, particularly under socialist rule and in the aftermath of
Croatian independence. Central streets of high historical and symbolic value were disproportionately
affected, whereas peripheral and more recently developed streets tended to exhibit
greater nominal continuity.
By foregrounding the entanglement of political power, urban identity, and spatial practices,
this article contributes to broader debates on postsocialist urban transformation. Methodologically,
it advances research on urban toponymy by integrating GIS-based spatial analysis with
archival sources. The results provide a foundation for future interdisciplinary research and offer
empirically grounded insights relevant to urban policy-making concerning the preservation
and transformation of public space nomenclature.
Keywords
street names; geographic information system (GIS); political ideology; Osijek; 20th century; urban toponymy
Hrčak ID:
342074
URI
Publication date:
30.10.2025.
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