The old street names of Timișoara

The same street, another Filipescu#

A change of name can pass almost unnoticed. Between the central boulevards there is a street that people in Timișoara simply call Filipescu. In the register’s columns it is Louis Barthou, after the French foreign minister assassinated in 1934. In the 1970s, the historian Vasile Docea writes, it became Leonte Filipescu, after a socialist militant who died in prison in 1922. In 1993 it was given the name of Nicu Filipescu, a Conservative leader and mayor of Bucharest at the end of the nineteenth century.

The surname stayed and the man changed. Docea recounts that the house at number 10 carried two signs side by side: one reading Nicu Filipescu, the other Leonte Filipescu.

Another street changed only a day of the calendar. In the “1936” and “1946” columns it is 10 Mai, the national day of the Kingdom. In the “1956” column it is Mihai Eminescu. Today it is 9 Mai, which the City Hall’s street-name dictionary explains as the Allied victory of 1945; 9 May is also the day of Romania’s independence in 1877. The register does not say when the name appeared: the name stands only in its “Sarmeș 1940” column, which has no reliable year.

• Strada Nicu FilipescuLouis Barthou›Leonte Filipescu›Nicu Filipescu
• Strada 9 MaiTakarékpénztár utca›10 Mai›Mihai Eminescu›9 Mai

People, places, words: the kind of name each period preferred#

Each name was sorted into one of four kinds: a person’s name, a place name (town, river, mountain), an ordinary word (plants, trades, ideas) or a date. The chart compares the same 475 streets, those with a recorded name in 1936, in 1989 and today.

In 1936, 251 of these streets carried a person’s name. In 1989, 184 did: under communism metropolitans, generals and local figures disappeared from the signs, often replaced with names that commemorate no one, such as Tazlău (a river), Holdelor (“of the crops”) or Pomiculturii (“of fruit growing”). Today there are 248, almost as many as in 1936. The 1989 number is partly reconstructed: on the 104 streets where the 1989 name is documented by a decision of 1990–1993, the numbers are 68, 28 and 89. These are the very streets renamed after the Revolution, so not a sample of the whole city; on the 287 with the same name in the “1956” column and today, the number naturally stays almost the same.

Of the 234 names tied to the 1993 decision, 88% are those of people. The same holds for new streets: 81% of those first named after 1993 are named after a person.

The table below includes, for each year, every street with a recorded name; that is why the total grows from row to row.

What the register does not know#

A sign on the wall is one entry in the City Hall’s street register: a street, a square, an alley or a stretch with a name of its own. The register as updated in 2025 has 1,344 rows; the wall has 1,347 signs, three more, because two rows of the register hold more than one sign here. Bulevardul Regele Mihai I appears three times, once for each of the streets it was made from in 2019: a part of Bulevardul Republicii, Strada Gheorghe Dima and Strada Sfântul Ioan. Strada Venus and Intrarea Venus (a street and a cul-de-sac), entered on a single row in the register, have a sign each. A “change of name” here means that one recorded name of a street is followed by a different one; the 807 names on the heap are these changes, not metal signs counted one by one.

Almost everything on this page comes from the street register of Timișoara City Hall, a table that gives, for each street, today’s name, the name before it, the decision that changed it and three historical columns: “1936”, “1946” and “1956”. The table does not say which guides the columns were copied from. For 1936 there is a printed city plan, included in the guides of the time; for 1946 and 1956 the source was not found, and for 1956 not even a printed guide, so the years are those written in the register, unconfirmed elsewhere.

The columns have errors. In a few rows the same name is entered for all three years, though it could not have been on the signs in all of them: “Șase Martie” (6 March 1945, when the first communist-led government took office), “Engels” or “Frimu” in 1936; “Mareșal Joffre” or “General Foch” in 1956. The 19 entries of this kind were set aside. Errors of the same kind that do not stand out have probably stayed on this page too.

The register also has a fourth column, “Sarmeș 1940”, probably named after the engineer Ioan Sarmeș, who ran the City Hall’s mapping office. Not all the names in it fit the year 1940: Truman and Attlee came to lead their countries only in 1945. So they appear here undated and are left out of the counts.

The register records names only for the years of its columns. A street renamed twice between 1956 and 1989 shows one change. So every number here is a minimum: a street “with four names” has had at least four. The year 1989 is not in the register either: for it the page shows the name before the last change. Of the 475 streets followed from 1936 to today, the 1989 name is documented for 104 by the decision that replaced it in 1990–1993; for 287 it is assumed, because it is the same in the “1956” column and today, though a street can lose and regain its name between two columns; for the other 84 it is reconstructed, and for those renamed after 1993 it may itself date from after 1989. The search result says which case a street is in.

The Russian and Soviet names were picked one by one from all the old names. The list includes nineteenth-century Russian writers and composers, such as Pushkin or Gogol, because they appear in the same column as the Soviet ones. The streets named after people killed in December 1989 are those found on the list of the Asociația 17 Decembrie 1989 Timișoara; the City Hall dictionary calls two more people martyrs of the Revolution who are not on that list.

The Hungarian names come from a single source, the list at the end of Gyula Delesega’s guide, which ties today’s Romanian name to the Hungarian one, with no year and, for most streets, no German name. The match is not always one to one: Magyar utca covers parts of Bulevardul Take Ionescu and of Strada Simion Bărnuțiu. 295 streets of the register could be tied to a name on the list.

The kind of each name and the corrected spelling of some of the old names (Winston Churchill for “Churchil Winston”) are interpretations made for this page, not information from the register; where a spelling was corrected, the search result also shows the register’s form.

Sources#

The renamings in Timișoara were described by the historian Vasile Docea, who used the same City Hall table and the guides of the time. This page adds the count, street by street.

• Timișoara City Hall, Nomenclatorul stradal (street register), version of 9 April 2013 (1,236 streets), published on data.gov.ro. The source of today’s names, the previous ones, the decisions and the “1936”, “1946”, “1956” and “Sarmeș 1940” columns. data.gov.ro
• Timișoara City Hall, Nomenclatorul stradal, the versions updated with Local Council Decisions no. 722 of 2022 and no. 194 of 2025 (1,344 rows). The source of the streets named or renamed after 2013 and of the corrected spellings. assets.primariatm.ro
• Timișoara Local Council Decision no. 241 of 26 May 2026: 28 new streets and one renaming, not yet on the wall. primariatm.ro
• The table behind this page, to download: one row for each name of each street, with the register’s spelling, the source, the year or column and a note where the year is not certain. mariuscomper.uk
• Timișoara Local Council Decision no. 149 of 20 March 2015, by which the council adopts the register (annex 4) and corrects the spelling of dozens of names. primariatm.ro
• Gyula Delesega, Temesvári kalauz téridőben (Timișoara, 2018), the street list on pp. 223–232: the Hungarian names and, for some streets, the German ones. diasporatm.ro
• Vasile Docea, “History, Ideology and Collective Memory: Reconstructing the Identities of Timișoara by Means of Monographies and Street Names during the Communist Regime (1947–1989)”, Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, European and Regional Studies, 1/1 (2010), pp. 83–102. The source of the facts from outside the register: the renaming complete by 1921, the Soviet names missing from the register, the years 1964 and 1966 for Bulevardul Take Ionescu. acta.sapientia.ro
• Fabian Timofte, Remus Crețan and Alexandru Drăgan, “Street (Re)Naming Practices and Spatial Ethnolinguistic Contact: A Longitudinal Study in Timișoara, Romania”, GeoHumanities, 4 May 2026. A study of the same subject, built on maps of the city from 1913, 1931 and 1980, for the historic districts. This page has not used its data, which the article does not publish. The street names the article gives as examples were compared with the register: those that can be checked agree, with one exception, which corrected here the 1989 name of Bulevardul Liviu Rebreanu (Ștefan Plăvăț). doi.org
• Árpád Jancsó, “Temesvár nyomtatott térképei”, Műszaki Szemle, 57 (2012), pp. 3–18: the printed plans and guides of the city; after 1949, the next street list appears only in 1959. Also the source for the engineer Ioan Sarmeș and the City Hall’s mapping office. emt.ro
• Timișoara City Hall, Dicționar explicativ al denumirii străzilor din Timișoara (2015): who the people on the plates are, and the length of each street. servicii.primariatm.ro
• Asociația 17 Decembrie 1989 Timișoara, “In memoriam”: the list of those killed in Timișoara in December 1989, against which the street names beginning with “Martir” (martyr) were compared. asociatia17decembrie1989timisoara.wordpress.com

More on Timișoara: the 1853 plan laid over today’s streets. What streets are called across Romania: Romania’s street names.