The Centre Keeps the Names

On 29 August 2013, at one of the four sessions that year at which it dealt with street names, the City Assembly of Niš passed a decision two sentences long. The first says: "The existing name Borska Street in the City Municipality of Medijana, Brzi Brod settlement, is changed to Dragoljub Janković Jenki Street." The second says that the decision is to be published in the Official Gazette. There is no explanation. That year the Assembly changed 84 names in the same way.

I downloaded the entire register of regulations of the City of Niš from the city's e-services portal and pulled out every act renaming a street, square or boulevard. There are 192 of them, from 1994 to 2026. Once the duplicates are removed (the Assembly decision and the Ministry's consent usually come as a pair), 295 name changes remain.

Articles about street names usually start from the question of what was changed: whom we took down, whom we put up. That question has a clear answer, and I will get to it. But the more interesting question is where. Because when the changes are laid out on a map, a pattern appears that none of the 192 acts ever puts into words.

Three waves

The changes do not arrive evenly. They come in waves, and each wave has its own logic.

The first wave, from 1994 to 2004, is ideological. It touches the inner city, from the centre itself out to Durlan, and a few villages. Out go cities from the other Yugoslav republics, communist officials and dates from the Yugoslav calendar. Zagreb Street becomes Knin Street, Ljubljana Street becomes Drainac Street, the street of the 5th Congress of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia becomes Nikola Pašić Street. In 1999 Lenin Boulevard becomes Nemanjić Boulevard, and United Nations Square becomes Saint Sava Square. In 2004 Karl Marx Street becomes Prince Mihailo Obrenović Street, Friedrich Engels Street becomes Nikolaj Velimirović Street, Liberation Square becomes King Milan Square. Not one act in this wave gives a reason. The reason went without saying.

The second wave, from 2009 to 2014, is administrative. It is also the largest: 84 changes in 2013 alone. This time it is not the inner city that changes but the suburban settlements: Donja Vrežina (60 changes over the whole period), Brzi Brod (28), the Nikola Tesla settlement in Niška Banja (22), the 9 May settlement (19). What disappears are mostly geographical names, Borska, Valjevska, Grdelička, Savska, and names that already exist somewhere else in the city. There were three streets called Savska. One act from 2009 shows this without comment: it lists identical names with the settlement in brackets, "Prosvetina (Durlan)" and "Prosvetina (Niška Banja)". The city had grown, the suburbs had entered a single address space, and streets with the same name had become a problem.

The third wave, from 2018 onwards, is memorial. For the first time the acts carry explanations and biographies. The new layer of names belongs to soldiers and victims of the wars of the 1990s and of 1999. Franc Rozman Street becomes Ljiljana Spasić Street, named after a 26-year-old pregnant woman who, as the decision puts it, "lost her life to cluster bombs on 7 May 1999". Adriatic Street becomes Heroes of Paštrik Street. Vinkovci Street becomes Victims of Jasenovac Street, with the explanation that "the time has come to correct this decades-long mistake".

The overall picture, counted from the acts: places in the former Yugoslavia outside Serbia disappear as old names 47 times and appear as new names 5 times. Communist and Partisan names disappear 46 times and arrive 4 times, all four in the same year, which I will come back to. Church names disappear once and arrive 21 times.

So far, the story is familiar. Decommunisation, address clean-up, the culture of remembrance: three themes, three articles. But this register holds another story too, and for that one you need to look at the map.

Taste as classification

There is an idea that is almost a commonplace today and still uncomfortable: taste is not a personal matter. What we experience as private choice, what we read, what we listen to, where we sit, is a social position speaking through us. Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.

Roughly, taste has three zones. The first is the canon: what school, museum and state recognise as valuable. The second is the reach towards the canon, knowing the big names without belonging to the world those names came from. The third is the taste of necessity: functional, immediate, without pretension.

A street name is a small public monument that says which history and which culture "count". And a city that names its streets does exactly this: it classifies. The only question is whether that classification has a geography.

It does.

The canon for the centre, the rest for the periphery

When I say the centre in this piece, I mean the inner city: the centre itself and the urban neighbourhoods around it. The periphery means the suburban settlements.

Look at what the centre received in the first wave: Prince Mihailo Obrenović, Nemanjić Boulevard, King Milan Square, King Alexander the Unifier Square, Saint Sava Square. Dynasties, saints, national history. That is the canon: the past made official.

Now look at what the periphery received. In the "Stevan Sinđelić" settlement in Donja Vrežina, in December 2007, Trebinjska became Beethoven Street, Cerska became Balzac Street, Kutinska became Chaplin Street, Đerdapska became Dante Street, Čačanska became Salvador Dalí Street. Two years later, in the same settlement, streets were named after Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić Einstein. These are great names, undisputed, universally recognised. And that is exactly what makes them interesting: none of them has anything to do with Vrežina, or Niš, or Serbia, except Mileva. This is the encyclopaedic canon, textbook culture. It is the second zone of taste: reaching for the canon through names that are safe precisely because they belong to no one.

And the third zone? In 2009, again in Donja Vrežina, the towns of Serbia and the former Yugoslavia gave way to Almond Street, Jasmine Street, Cherry Street, Winemakers' Street. No history, no baggage, no risk. The taste of necessity, applied to toponymy.

And then comes 2013, the largest wave, in which 70 of the 84 new names belong to people I cannot identify, either from the text of the acts or from general history. I have to be precise here: that does not mean these people are unimportant. Very likely they are respected people from the settlements themselves. But the acts do not say so, and so it remains an assumption.

The result is a map in three layers: the centre carries the national canon, part of the periphery carries someone else's canon, and the rest of the periphery carries nature and local names.

Who gives up the name

The most interesting wave is the one that looks least interesting: the administrative one.

Removing duplicate names sounds like pure technical work. Two Savska streets cannot exist in the same city; one of them has to change. But which one? The acts do not answer that question, because they never ask it. The answer only shows in the examples.

In Brzi Brod in 2013, Nikola Tesla Street became Dragomir Stanojević Street. In the same wave, Teslina Street became Branka Đorđević Street. Also removed were Đura Jakšić, Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, Stevan Sinđelić and Karađorđe, names that still exist in the inner city: Karađorđe Street in the centre itself, Đura Jakšić Street in Bubanj, Nikola Tesla Street by the Old Cemetery. None of these names is controversial. Nobody takes down Tesla for ideological reasons. But when two identical names meet, it is the periphery that loses it. In this register I found not a single case in which a street in the inner city changed its name because the same name existed in Brzi Brod.

This is the purest form of hierarchy: one that is not experienced as hierarchy but as the natural order of things. The rule "the centre has priority" is written down nowhere. It does not need to be. It is built into the very question "which of the two streets should change", to which everyone already knows the answer.

And here is the cost. Renaming a street costs the city almost nothing: one session, one decision. It costs the residents: a new ID card, a new address in the land registry, at the bank, on the bills, in every contract. Until 2020 not one of the 192 acts explains to residents why this is happening to them in particular. Nobody forces anybody. It is enough that everyone accepts that the address on the periphery is the address that changes.

Names the centre sends back

There is one detail in the register that shows this better than any table.

In 2004, in the centre of Niš, Filip Kljajić Street became King Stefan the First-Crowned Street. In the same wave, in Durlan, just outside the centre, the streets of Drinka Pavlović and Zele Veljković disappeared too, today Gutenberg Street and Salonika Front Veterans Street: Partisan names, taken off streets in the inner city in the name of the new canon.

Nine years later, in 2013, Marshal Tito Street in Brzi Brod became Filip Kljajić Street. Moša Pijade Street became Drinka Pavlović Street. In Donja Vrežina, Lola Ribar Street became Zele Veljković Street.

The same names the inner city threw out come back, but to the periphery. This is not an ideological reversal, since one Partisan name simply replaces another. It is an administrative logic, indifferent to ideology. But it is not indifferent to place. There is a well-known pattern by which whatever those at the top discard as outdated moves down the social ladder. Here it happens literally, on the map: the names the centre no longer wants, the periphery receives.

This is my interpretation, not a finding from the acts. But the data are there: three names, two years, two parts of the city.

A boulevard on the edge

One case does not fit easily, and that is why it is worth mentioning. In 2009 the Southern Boulevard became Šaban Bajramović Boulevard. A Roma musician, a symbol of popular culture that the canon long refused to recognise, gets a boulevard. It is a rare elevation of the popular to the rank of the canon.

But again: the Southern Boulevard, not the centre.

What nobody asks

There are also assumptions that all participants share so deeply that nobody questions them.

In this register there are three. First, that naming is the job of the state, not of the neighbourhood: from 1994 to today, not one act mentions that residents were asked. Second, that a street must carry a message, the name of a person or an event, rather than simply be a label so the postman can find the house. Third, that the past is something that can be corrected, as that 2020 sentence about the "decades-long mistake" puts it.

And how much is invested in this game shows in the case of Albanian Golgotha Street. In 2018 Albanian Golgotha Street in Palilula became Petar Seratlić Street. A year later, in 2019, a new decision annulled the previous one and restored Albanian Golgotha. It is the only formal restoration of an old name in the whole register. When two sessions of the Assembly take the trouble over a single street name within one year, it is clear that the game is worth playing.

What connects the three waves

At first glance, thirty years of street renaming in Niš looks like three unrelated stories: decommunisation in the 1990s, address clean-up after the city expanded, the culture of remembrance after 2018. Each has its own reason and its own actors.

But look at where, not only at what, and you see what connects them: in all three waves the arrangement is the same. The centre gets the canon. The periphery gets what is left over, including the names the inner city threw away. The largest wave, the one of 2013 that was presented as purely technical, is precisely the one in which the hierarchy is most visible, because nobody says it out loud.

A street name is the only public label every resident carries on their ID card. A city that changes it without a word of explanation, and always on the same side of town, is not only saying something about the past. It is also saying something about who, in the present, has a right to a name.