Називи улица Чачка 1893–1992: један век изграђивања колективног идентитета

English title: The Street Names of Čačak, 1893–1992: A Century of Constructing Collective Identity

The article analyzes the street names of Čačak from 1893 to 1992 as a historical source for understanding symbolic power, political culture, and collective memory. The first systematic naming of streets was connected to the town’s urban development, but from the beginning it also had a clear ideological function: selected figures, events, dynasties, national regions, and historical traditions were inscribed into public space.

Over the course of a century, Čačak’s street nomenclature became a map of regime change and competing traditions. The Obrenović layer, Karađorđević and Yugoslav state ideology, Austro-Hungarian occupation renamings, interwar compromises, revolutionary ruptures after 1945, later socialist stabilization, and the post-socialist revival of older names all show that public space was never ideologically empty.

The article emphasizes that traditions were never completely erased. They were suppressed, displaced, renamed, sometimes restored, and sometimes preserved in side streets or local memory. The history of street names is therefore not only a history of erasure, but also a history of symbolic survival.

The strongest symbolic weight was carried by central streets, whose visibility amplified political messages. The article also reveals structural imbalances in public memory: the dominance of political, military, dynastic, and revolutionary traditions over cultural, economic, female, social, and local civic contributions.

Although published in 2000, the article remains analytically relevant. It shows how the microhistory of a single town can reveal long-term processes of modern Serbian history: state-building, dynastic change, occupation, Yugoslavism, socialist revolution, the collapse of Yugoslavia, and the reshaping of public memory.