Where the Streets Have Tito’s Name
After Tito’s grave, Tito’s streets.
A few weeks ago, a friend sent me an article in the Slovenian newspaper Delo titled, “Tito Squares and Streets as Remembrance and Reminders.”
The article debated the question whether the continued existence in Slovenia of places named after Tito was “nostalgia, shame, or a part of heritage” (in fact in the online version the piece got renamed to “Tito Squares and Streets: Nostalgia, Shame—Or Part of Heritage?”).
According to the article, five squares and nine streets named after Tito remain in Slovenia. The map “Finding Tito” by the Italian researcher Giorgio Comai displays a dozen.
Comai created the map in 2017, finding 276 squares, streets, roads, waterfronts, parks, and other public places in former Yugoslav states bearing the name of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito.
This was their distribution on the map at the time:
The map does not appear to have been updated since its creation, and it was already inaccurate then (it includes three places in Croatia renamed before its launch). Nonetheless, it was widely reported, in both local and regional English-language media and remains the best source on the subject.
The Delo article was on page 4, in the section titled Aktualno (Current Affairs). The placement may suggest the matter is of pressing importance today, somehow.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Free Your Tito…
After Yugoslavia’s dissolution, a large number of places named after Tito were renamed, beginning with cities bearing his name’s adjective. Titovo Velenje (Slovenia) became Velenje (though the city retains Tito Square with its biggest Tito statue in the world); Titov Veles (Macedonia) became Veles; Titograd (Montenegro) became Podgorica; and so on.
Renaming follows every regime change, whereby the new rulers aim to promote their version of history, what’s important and what is not. The Communists changed street names after they came into power after WWII as well. Rulers before them did so, too, as have new regimes or governments elsewhere in the world; in the 16 years I lived in Portland, Oregon, liberal/lefty government renamed two major streets to honor historical figures it deemed important (and they were).
You can trace the winds of political changes through the changes of street names.
Following the aforementioned changes in Croatia, a generation after Yugoslavia’s dissolution, the matter of Tito in public spaces seemed to have been settled across the former Yugoslavia, the recent diversionary proposal by the Belgrade mayor to relocate Tito’s grave* notwithstanding.
Articles like the one in Delo serve merely to stir the pot over what has over the years become a non-issue and to bait clicks in the process (to wit, Delo, which means Labor, was first published in 1959 upon a merger of two newspapers published by the Communist Party of Slovenia). Controversy sells.
…And Tito Will Not Follow
What’s more interesting is where the persisting Tito place names are located.
As is clear from the “Finding Tito” maps, most of the Serbian instances are in multicultural Vojvodina and most of the Croatian ones in Istria, which was added to Yugoslavia after WWII; (North) Macedonia, which is said to have achieved a republic status thanks to Tito, is the third hot spot of Tito’s memory. That is, roughly places that greatly benefited from Yugoslavia.
Conversely, Kosovo, the least pro-Yugoslav unit of Yugoslavia has no Tito names.
Street renaming process has a twofold effect, according to Monica Palmberger:
- it eradicates the old name in order to de-commemorate what was previously remembered; and
- it establishes a new commemorative space with the new name.
In other words, renaming directs what should be forgotten and what should be remembered.
As mundane objects, street signs may seem to be less impactful than monuments, but, Palmberger continues, “commemorative street names conflate history and geography, merge the past they commemorate into ordinary settings of human life, and represent history as a “natural order of things.”
And People’s Minds Even Less So
But people who live and work and play in those streets may don’t always follow the prescribed paths.
When I visited Zagreb in November 2019, I set out to ask people walking across the Republic of Croatia Square its name. Two years prior, the square’s name was controversially changed from Marshal Tito Square, which it had borne since 1946.
I don’t know whether it was their caution speaking with a stranger holding a recorder, but of those few Zagrebians who did answer my question, almost everyone called it Theater Square, after the theater we were standing next to. The square had indeed been called Theater Square but only for a short period, 1945-1946; the original calls to rename it from Marshal Tito also proposed that name.
It wasn’t even the square’s second name change:
- 1878–1888 Sajmišni trg (Fairground Square)
- 1888–1919 Sveučilišni trg (University Square)
- 1919–1927 Wilsonov trg (Woodrow Wilson Square)
- 1927–1941 Trg kralja Aleksandra I. (King Alexander I Square)
- 1941–1945 Trg 1 (Square No. 1)
- 1945–1946 Kazališni trg (Theater Square)
- 1946–2017 Trg maršala Tita (Marshal Tito Square)
- 2017–present Trg Republike Hrvatske (Republic of Croatia Square)
During a 6-month stay in Zagreb last year, the only place I heard the square referred to by its new name was on transit, during stop announcements.
Where the residents of Zagreb failed to prevent the renaming of Marshal Tito Square, Sarajevans had succeeded and Marshal Tito Street is still Marshal Tito Street.
And there are residents of Vienna Street in Ljubljana, who insist on keeping their street’s old name.
You can trace how people feel about Tito, and by extension Yugoslavia, through the changes or the absence of changes of public spaces named after him.