The Road to Europe: Changing the Street Names in Nineteenth Century Bucharest

As Romania was making great strides towards its independence from Ottoman rule, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the capital city of Bucharest was undergoing some significant changes. Developed as an important trade centre, and, like most of the cities in the region, built without any initial city planning, Bucharest had an irregular and tortuous street network. This made orientation particularly difficult for outsiders, especially foreigners, often leading them to refer to it as an oriental city. The streets were not properly marked and many did not even have a name. This article deals with the particular moment at which, taking the example of other European capitals, the city's officials started attributing new names to streets. It will question the changes which occurred in the different names categories during three particular years: 1871, 1879 and 1900. The 1871 list of street names was the first published inventory. The 1879 list came out right after the War of Independence, in 1878, when about a dozen streets were renamed in order to honour the victorious army. As urbanization accelerated, towards the end of the century, the increasing number of streets drove the authorities to take firm measures towards naming them and numbering the buildings. In this, as in many other initiatives, the young Romanian state followed the example of other European nations, with whom it wished to be associated. A standard iterative coding process was used to establish categories of names among the three street lists. This coding process provided clusters of data items representing a code, cluster or theme. The measurement of the data cluster size determined the importance of the various categories. These categories were then examined by percentage comparison across the three specific dates in order to reveal change across time. This permitted the construction of a time line which reflects changes within the Romanian society during the second half of the nineteenth century.