What do street names have to do with the way Romanians understand capitalism today? More than one might expect. Long before textbooks, statistics, or political slogans, streets were the first public lesson in how an economy works. They recorded who built, who traded, who took risks, who invested, who created value.

A city that erases the names of its people also erases its economic memory. In Bucharest, that memory was not lost by accident. It was deliberately broken, arbitrarily rearranged, and overwritten by a regime obsessed with de-individualizing urban space and wiping out the traces of a country that, between the wars, already functioned according to capitalist logic.

To walk through Bucharest today is to walk through a palimpsest: layers of meaning scraped away, replaced, and half-forgotten. Nowhere is this more visible than on its street signs.

Street Names and Capitalism

Before communism, in an era we now recall only in fragments, there was a simple conviction - perhaps a “prejudice,” as postmodernists might say, but a healthy one: places had to make sense. A street was not merely a label but a story. Sometimes obscure, sometimes transparent, but always a story - a trace left by a person, a profession, a company, a craft, or a decisive moment. Streets functioned as a form of archaeology in plain sight, a way for the city to remember itself.

Then came “modernity,” with its ambition to make tabula rasa—to break the thread and start anew. Declaratively, it sounded beautiful: creativity, progress, renewal. But the world tends to forget one inconvenient detail: God creates ex nihilo; man cannot. When man develops demiurgic ambitions, the result is usually absurdity. Bucharest experienced nearly every version of it in the twentieth century.

In a system where, as in Orwell’s 1984, history was constantly rewritten and any historical figure could overnight turn from hero to villain—depending on the whims of the Party and the Securitate - it became dangerous to show imagination.

So it was safer not to take risks. Except, of course, for the risk of assigning streets arbitrary, banal, utterly meaningless names. In the end, this served two of communism’s core objectives perfectly: de-individualization and the erasure of tradition.

The Interwar Period: A Capitalist City Named After People and Companies

In the 1920s and 1930s, street guides revealed a city deeply connected to Romanian capitalism - a city with a name and a face, where the economy left visible traces on maps, not just in statistics. Streets were named after bankers and industrialists; arteries bore the names of liberal professions -Lipscani, Negustori, Blănari, Șepcari, Mămulari, Covaci, Șelari, Gabroveni, Zarafi, Cavafi, Căldărari, Agricultori, Precupeți, Făinari, Franzelari, Orzari, Măcelari, Pieptănari, Băcani; neighborhoods were built by investors—Domenii, Filantropia, Fabrica de Chibrituri (Match Factory), Mașina de Pâine (Bread Machine), Vaporul lui Assan (Assan’s Steamboat), Floreasca; areas where Romanian and foreign corporations established their headquarters.

Urban space functioned as a catalogue of economic memory - a living textbook of Romanian capitalism.

To understand the rupture, it helps to recall a few names now forgotten. Mauriciu Blank, for example. Before 1948, Bucharest had a street bearing the name of the great banker behind Marmorosch, Blank & Co., the institution that financed the Kingdom’s infrastructure and advised Prime Minister I. I. C. Brătianu to send Romania’s national treasury to the United Kingdom rather than to Russia.

There was also Stock Exchange Street, where not only the Stock, Shares, and Exchange Market operated, but also the Italian and Romanian Commercial Bank. National Bank Street housed the National Society for Industrial Credit, which financed Romania’s strategic sectors. And on Raymond Poincaré Street stood the headquarters of the Grain Merchants’ Bank, a pillar of interwar agricultural credit.

These names were not decorative. They were the metadata of Romanian capitalism. Each street silently testified: here there was risk, here there was capital, here something was built.

Communism: When the City Loses Its People and Becomes a List of Abstractions

After nationalization - when the State Bank of the People’s Republic of Romania replaced a stock-exchange-listed central bank -this semantic universe became unacceptable. The communist regime systematically erased the evidence of capitalist Romania. Street names without “healthy origins” - those evoking markets, companies, bankers, or industrialists -were eliminated throughout the country, but nowhere more aggressively than in Bucharest.

Major arteries received workerist, technical, Soviet-style names that survive to this day: Foundry Workers, Fitters, Reconstruction, Productivity, Pickaxe, Slag. Boulevards such as Carol, Elisabeta, and Ferdinand became Republicii, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Dimitrov.

What followed was a carnival of arbitrariness: Ebonite, Detector, Document, Shower, Rustle, Storm, Backpack, Housewives, Self-Sacrifice, Diligence, Hollow, Guidance, Pride, Aspiration, Prosperity, Progress, Solidarity.

Communism did not merely change street signs. It removed real people from the city and replaced them with abstract concepts. Where capitalism once inscribed names, communism imposed ideas. What had been a story became a propaganda leaflet.

The Sentence That Explains Everything

If urban space tells you nothing about Romanian capitalism, neither will the collective mindset. Streets are our first economics textbook—and that textbook was erased.

When we say we are “going to work,” we implicitly refer to the division of labor characteristic of capitalist societies, where individuals provide services to one another. Exchange presupposes reciprocity.

Why Romanians Are Still Confused About Capitalism

Romanians struggle to relate naturally to capitalism because they do not know it historically (not the real one, but the one rewritten in textbooks), they do not see it in cities (whose streets no longer tell them anything), and they do not fully feel it in language (where terms inherited from the communist era continue to circulate).

It is not enough to use words like service or job - concepts that presuppose division of labor and mutual exchange. The mindset still operates according to the logic of the unit, the district, allocation, the “person responsible for the sector.”

Like street names, vocabulary is a thin capitalist veneer over communist reflexes. It is no coincidence that “capitalist” Romania adopts laws that sound like free markets but function according to old habits. The terminology is modern; the spirit remains unchanged. That is why we are constantly surprised that institutions “do not work.” They work perfectly - just not according to the logic we claim to have adopted.

And Yet, the Traces Do Not Fully Disappear

Ironically, despite the effort to repress any link to capitalism - that capitalism Nicolae Ceaușescu flamboyantly condemned as “the world of plunder and oppression” - some linguistic, cultural, and economic traces survived. Service survived. Job survived. After 1990, a handful of street names were restored, though far too few to reshape the collective mindset.

In Bucharest, restitution is difficult but visible. Lascăr Catargiu Boulevard, once renamed Ana Ipătescu when the people had supposedly “taken their fate into their own hands,” is one example. Elsewhere, the process drags on.

In Focșani, for instance, Ana Ipătescu Street still exists alongside Equity Alley, without restoring names such as Lascăr Catargiu, I. C. Brătianu, or Carol I. The city’s beautiful theater, built at the initiative of Major Gheorghe Pastia, still stands on Republicii Street rather than on Lascăr Catargiu Boulevard—the name the artery bore before the benefactor’s death.

When Ceaușescu declared that “in Romania, capitalism has been set forever,” he was not announcing a doctrine but inadvertently outlining a cultural project: a country stripped of the reference points needed to understand capitalism at all. In this sense, his successors succeeded flawlessly. Romania’s transition to capitalism has been largely nominal.

The streets - the most accessible, everyday textbook of economic life - remain trapped in a socialist logic: anonymous, abstract, memory-less. And this is why, often without realizing it, we still live in a Bucharest that teaches us every morning not capitalism, but its amnesia.

 

---

• Colonies and Freedom: Why Some Flourish and Others Fail

  < Prev
• Père-Lachaise, un Bellu plus grand – la beauté entre Paris et le Petit...

  Next >