Mezi kontinuitou a změnou: Městské názvosloví a postsocialistická transformace v perspektivě kritické toponymie / Between Continuity and Change. Urban Toponymy and Post-Socialist Transformation from the Perspective of Critical Toponymy

The naming of public spaces is a popular tool that ruling regimes have used since the second half of the 19th century to imprint their values on the public sphere and to express symbolic power. However, due to frequent changes in the political and social context, urban naming systems also change frequently. The most recent significant intervention in Central and Eastern Europe was the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s. Among the main features of the wave of post-socialist renaming were a widespread “cleansing of sins”—that is, the restoration of original names to places that had been renamed during the communist dictatorship—as well as numerous disputes and dilemmas regarding which names to remove and what to replace them with. Naming policy stems from a broader political and historical context, but ultimately it is always the result of negotiations within specific local conditions. This paper examines changes in city names—known as urbanonymy—through the lens of critical toponymy, which links cultural and political geography with history, memory studies, or anthropology. It presents the main trends in the transformation of urbanonymy in the period following the collapse of the socialist bloc and, based on selected works, offers insight into specific situations involving the renaming of public spaces, with a particular focus on Czech and Slovak cities. At the same time, it highlights a renewed wave of interest in lingering socialist toponyms and their repoliticization in the context of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine after 2014.