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In order to achieve their functional purpose – that of organizing the urban landscape and helping locating people and geographical objectives through an efficient addressing system – street names are bound to remain stable spatial landmarks. On the other hand, street names are also semiotic devices of signifying space with the political and commemorative agenda of the ruling power. This latter characteristic renders them vulnerable to successive renaming following important power-shifts and especially regime changes. What happens when the ideological imperative of politicizing the street nomenclature undermines its functional requirement of providing spatial orientation through extensive renaming? Such a tensional situation is examined in the case of postwar Sibiu between 1945 and 1948, when the city endured a thorough redefinition of its toponymy under the political regime of communist “popular democracy” in Romania. The paper quantifies the scope of toponymic revision and then evaluates the content of these street name changes in terms of three major concepts: class, ethnicity, and gender. Grounded on the results of this analysis, the paper advances the notion of “mercurial street names”. It concludes by arguing that such a concept should complement the existing metaphoricity underpinning the scholarship in place-name studies, which draw on “text”, “discourse”, and “palimpsest” to conceive of the processes of street (re)naming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the manifesting of Romania’s independence from Moscow in 1968, based on diplomatic documents from the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belgium. Romania’s dialogue with Moscow, Prague, Belgrade and Paris are presented in this article. The article proves that beyond the political regime, the national interest of Romania was permanent and it has manifested itself when it had this chance. It was an act of courage, openness and prestige. It was a risky move, but Romania managed to avoid a Soviet invasion. Internally, however, the Bucharest regime did not embark on the path of reforms, but of neo-Stalinism, the cult of personality and communist ideological correctness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article looks into the prolongations between the interwar and the communist period with regards to the discussion on defining the state church relationship. The survivals from the interwar period into the communist regime, be them in specialists, ideas, modernization projects, have impacted the way in which Romanian communism dealt with religion. The characteristics of the new regime have also put their mark on the design of the relationship - lack of trained specialists, lack of a clear understanding of communist ideology. The relationship was designed on a Soviet model, while the model was still in testing period and the consequences showed in the cases where the model was applied. Thus this paper suggests that instead of thinking this state church relationship came with the new regime one has to look at it as a surviving relationship that went back to mid-19th century for some particularities and mostly to the interwar period with regards to the specialists, points of contingencies between state and church, rules and regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]