ABSTRACT

This chapter shows how names and monuments became tools in refiguring relations to certain groups, nations, and regions as well as their histories in reworking Croatian identity during post-socialist transition. It also shows how the negotiations between conflictive discourses have been transposed and retransposed into the configuration of the symbolic landscape of the Croatian capital. The chapter examines the changes in Zagreb statuary and street toponymy, showing how manifestations of three discursive practices—Othering, auto-referencing, and negotiating unresolved meanings—have contributed to the recent transformation of the symbolic landscapes of Croatia's capital city. The installation and removal of public plaques and statuary, as well as the renaming of streets in post-socialist Zagreb, has been a revealing indicator of political change and an instrument in the recodification of landscape. In the early-1990s, Serbs and Serbia were erased from the names of Zagreb's streets. Almost all street names in Zagreb referring to Serbian cities were changed in the early-1990s.