Changing Belgrade Street Names: A Sign of the Times

For 70 years, Marko Cabric’s family has lived in the same apartment building on the same street in Belgrade. Yet, in that time, they’ve had four different addresses.

This is not unusual for many Belgraders. After the fall of Communism in the 1990s, many countries in Eastern Europe started renaming streets to reinforce their states’ emerging national identities.

But, while street renaming was significant in cities like East Berlin, Bucharest and Sofia, the process in the former Yugoslav states, such as Serbia, was even more expansive and radical. Those states were not only shifting from Socialism to democracy but from a unified, multi-ethnic state to six independent nation-states.

In Belgrade, the capital of Socialist Yugoslavia for 45 years, the government was tasked with rebranding its street names to reflect a suddenly exclusively Serbian identity. This has proved a huge and controversial undertaking.

“There were layers and layers of Yugoslav identity in Belgrade streets that weren’t present in other major Yugoslav cities,” Srdjan Radovic, a researcher at the Institute of Ethnography in Belgrade who has written several books on street renaming, said.

“Belgrade did not state this openly, but the underlying policy was getting rid of not only socialism but Yugoslavism from street names, to show the country as Serbian as possible.

Today, street naming and renaming in Belgrade still represents a major division in Serbian society over the way the past is remembered.