What became of 23 August Street

The street register kept by Romania's Ministry of Finance, current to 2016, also records the old names of streets. In 216 towns it lists 1,060 street names given by the communist regime (each name counted once per locality): dates such as 23 August and 30 December, people such as Petru Groza and Ilie Pintilie, Soviet names such as Lenin. By 2016 only 114 were still on the plates. The regime's dates were often replaced by other dates: 1 December and 22 December.

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The calendar

The regime's dates were replaced by other dates#

The regime put its calendar on street plates. 23 August commemorates the 1944 coup, and its anniversary became the national holiday under communist rule; 30 December marks the proclamation of the People's Republic in 1947; 6 March, the Groza government imposed in 1945; 7 November, the Russian revolution of 1917. In towns, the register lists 583 such names that disappeared, with the new name recorded.

Regime dates that disappeared from towns, by the new name in the register. Band width: number of localities.

In 94 cases the new name is another date. Most often 1 December, the day of the 1918 union and Romania's national day since 1990, and 22 December, the day Ceaușescu fell from power in 1989. 30 December became 22 December 20 times and 1 December 14 times; 23 August became 1 December 17 times. Names of Romanian communist figures and symbols (Petru Groza, Ilie Pintilie, Scânteii, the People's Army) were given a date only 3 times in 148.

The gap also shows in the 24 counties drawn at random for checking: there, 48 of 340 date names got another date, against 3 of 83 names of figures and symbols. Sometimes the change stayed in the same month: 30 December became 22 December, 7 November became 15 November (the day of the Brașov revolt of 1987).

The ladder

Lenin went everywhere, 1 May stayed almost everywhere#

The register knows a Lenin Street in 74 town localities; by 2016 not one still carried the name. The same holds for Karl Marx (42), Engels (26) and the Red Army (17). Some had gone before 1989: the regime itself replaced some Soviet street names (in Sibiu, Stalin Street became Nicolae Bălcescu in 1970).

The regime's dates rarely stayed: 6 March in 5 localities of 143, 7 November in 4 of 116, 23 August in 20 of 186. 13 December (a workers' march of 1918) stayed in 25 of 53, and 1 May, which also marks International Workers' Day, in 158 of 195.

V. I. Lenin0 of 74
Armata Roșie0 of 17
Friedrich Engels0 of 26
Karl Marx0 of 42
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej0 of 14
7 Noiembrie4 of 116
6 Martie5 of 143
Vasile Roaită1 of 27
Olga Bancic1 of 12
Dr. Petru Groza3 of 35
Ilie Pintilie2 of 23
30 Decembrie13 of 137
23 August20 of 186
Grivița Roșie3 of 25
Scânteii8 of 29
Maxim Gorki6 of 20
16 Februarie17 of 49
13 Decembrie25 of 53
1 Mai158 of 195

Regime names in towns (once per locality): in how many localities they were still on the plates in 2016.

Words of labour and youth stayed almost everywhere: Youth, Peace, Builders. They are not counted here, because villages still give such names to new streets.

Where they stayed

More stayed in the towns of Wallachia#

On the map each circle is a town with streets that carried names of the regime; lit circles kept at least one until 2016. More stayed in Prahova county (Breaza, Bușteni, Azuga, Vălenii de Munte, Urlați) and in the towns around Bucharest.

In the 24 counties drawn for checking, towns in Wallachia (Muntenia and Oltenia) kept 20% of these names, against 6% in the rest of the country. In the other 18 counties the gap is smaller (15% against 9%) and not certain. Part of it probably reflects how carefully town halls entered the old names in the register.

Not shown

Town size and the Hungarian share settle nothing#

The data show no clear link between a town's size and whether the names stayed. In towns with a Hungarian majority, the checking counties kept a single name of 30, but the other counties kept more than the rest of the country; the difference does not pass the test.

A model that knows the region, the town's size, the Hungarian share and the kind of name separates kept names from changed ones poorly: its AUC on the checking counties is 0.645, below the bar of 0.65 set in advance.

2016 → 2026

What changed since#

Of the 114 regime names still on streets in 2016, 73 appear under the same name on the OpenStreetMap map of 2026. 19 no longer do. OpenStreetMap coverage is too incomplete to judge the other 22.

The map is not an official register: a street can be missing from it without having been renamed, and a few old names remain on the map though the register shows them changed (a 173-metre Lenin Street is still on the map in Călărași). The page shows what each source says for every street.

Limits

What the register does not know#

The register does not say when a name changed. Its dates (mostly 2000) show when it was loaded, not the year of the renaming. Some Soviet names went before 1989 by the regime's own decision. The years in the page's historical examples come from other sources.

Village registers rarely keep old names, so for villages the page shows what it finds without saying how much stayed. The list of names comes from historical work (Nicolae 2000, Rusu 2021, Calcan 2017, Stănescu 2000); names older than 1947, such as 11 June or Tudor Vladimirescu, are not counted.

Method#

The source is the street register published by the Ministry of Finance on data.gov.ro, one package per county, as of 16 September 2016. Each street has a status (current, with history, or abolished), and two tables link old names to new ones. A regime name is counted once per locality, however many streets carried it there. It stayed if a street with that name is still current; it changed if it appears only as abolished or as an old name. Spelling fixes (23.Aug becoming 23 August) are not counted as changes. Where the register gives several new names for one old name (37 cases), what counts is whether any of them is a date.

The hypotheses were formed after a first look at every county. The counties were then split at random, 18 for fitting the model and 24 for checking, and the thresholds were written before the check. The check therefore confirms directions already seen at the first look, without being an independent validation. Passed: dates replaced by dates, and the Wallachia gap. Failed: Hungarian towns, town size, the model. The comparison with figures and symbols alone, leaving out Soviet names (some removed by the regime itself), was added afterwards.

Checks: in Timișoara, all six regime names removed by the 1990 decisions also appear as changed in the register. Rusu (2024) counts 48 of 163 Republic streets renamed, from the polling-station register; this register gives 57 of 172 in towns.

Others measured before this page how much changed after 1989: Light (2004) for Bucharest, Rusu (2019, 2024) for 259 towns, finding about 12.3% of pre-1989 streets renamed. Light and Young (2018) noted five 23 August streets still standing in Romania. What this page adds is the count for each name, the names that replaced them, the 2026 check and the search by town.