Usuwanie komunistycznych patronów ulic

Pierwsza fala dekomunizacji ulic w Krakowie

Abstract

THE REMOVAL OF COMMUNIST STREET NAMES. THE FIRST WAVE OF THE DECOMMUNIZATION OF KRAKÓW’S STREETS

The paper describes the process of the decommunization of Kraków’s public space carried out by the Kraków City Council of the first term of office (1990–1994). The councillors reinstated the original, prewar names of several dozen streets and removed over a hundred names glorifying persons, events and dates which had been significant for Communism and had been introduced into the city’s public space in the era of the Polish People’s Republic by Communist party-controlled local authorities. Despite the fact that the major initiators of these changes – city councillors, as well as other members of the Special Committee on Monuments, Plaques and Names of Streets, Squares and Bridges in Kraków, which had been established by the Kraków City Council on 6 July 1990 by passing resolution No. III/22/90 and operated until 31 December 1990 – performed an excellent, solid job, some minor mistakes had not been avoided. Some of these errors have since been corrected, yet others still exist. The article presents the chronology of events, the Committee’s behind-the-scenes activity, the mechanism of open debate with the local community, as well as the dilemmas that the councillors had to confront by selecting specific street names to be removed and proposing new ones to replace them. The results of the Committee’s work can be seen until this day, the street names which were then reinstated are still used by local residents, and the Decommunization Law of 2016 only applied to about 7–10 cases in Kraków, which, given the total number of the city’s street names at the time (ca. 2.4 thousand), clearly demonstrates the massive scale of the work covered by the members of the said Committee and the councillors of the first term of office of Kraków’s reborn local government.