Buildings’ Names in the Bulgarian City of Ruse

Abstract

Giving names to individual buildings (known as oikodomonyms) is a common onomastic feature of many European cities. However, this largely applies to unique buildings, historical and architectural monuments, or luxury housing rather than regular buildings. There is also a recent trend of commercial naming that comes from developers as part of their marketing strategy. This article dwells on the names of residential apartment buildings in Ruse, the largest Bulgarian city on the Danube River, which are mostly qualified as standard housing type. This naming case is interesting by its scale: more than two-thirds of the apartment buildings in the city have their own official names recorded in administrative documents. Residents refer to them for more exact orientations, for example, when calling emergency services, and the media use them to specify the location of events taking place. Thus, the names of apartment buildings in Ruse are well-familiar to the townspeople and are actively used by the urban community. The paper examines the entirety of these names in terms of their motivation, particularly, the commemorative, “geographical,” and conditionally symbolic appellations. The first group perpetuates the names of renowned figures of local, national, or global significance. The second consists of names referring to geographical (and often symbolic) locations, key to the Bulgarian culture. The names of the third group are motivated by designations of realities, concepts, and images having deep cultural relevance — evoking positive emotions and conveying the spirit of the 1970s.

Keywords

• urban onymic space
• oikodomonymy
• urbanonymy
• nominative theme
• naming motivation
• ruse
• bulgaria