Street names in early modern Muscovy

At the time that Orenburg was founded at its present location in 1743, street names were already well established in the Russian Empire. In Moscow, for example, street names have been reported since the second half of the fifteenth century. These were usually descriptive names – such as ‘Big Street’ – or referred to important buildings in the area, like churches or monasteries. Such designations usually arose spontaneously among the population, and they changed as frequently as the course of the streets themselves. In early modern Muscovy, urban development took place without planning and evolved with each of the frequent fires. As a result, the streets and paths often shifted their course. Therefore, street names were rarely used for orientation; more important were references to significant buildings, such as churches, or the name of the entire quarter or settlement, called sloboda in Russian. Only the most important streets were given their own names, first by the population and later also by the administration. The first official street name in Moscow was documented in 1658.Footnote ⁶ By the end of the seventeenth century, however, street names had also become established in provincial towns and were being marked on town maps. For example, a plan of the Siberian town of Tobol’sk, drawn by the Russian cartographer Semyon U. Remezov in 1701, shows names for all the major streets.Footnote ⁷

Yet in Orenburg, the situation was different. Nepliuev and Galafeev did not simply register street names already in use among the population; instead they invented entirely new names and systematically gave them to all streets. In doing so, they followed the example of the authorities of Western European planned cities, who had already tried such a procedure. For example, in Karlsruhe, founded in 1715 as the capital of Margrave Charles III William of Baden-Durlach, all important streets were officially given names three years after the city’s founding.Footnote ⁸ This same approach had also already been employed in the colonies. For New Orleans, the capital of the Compagnie du Mississippi, a systematic set of street names was included in the plans just a few years after the city’s founding in 1718.Footnote ⁹ In the Russian Empire, however, the systematic assigning of street names was still a novel concept. Not even the capital, St Petersburg, which had been founded in 1703, had any street names in its first few decades. Friedrich Christian Weber, who was at Tsar Peter’s court as a diplomat in the service of Hanover and published a detailed report about his stay in 1721, stated that there were no street names at all in St Petersburg. According to Weber, anyone looking for a particular place would have had to ask others until they found someone who could describe the way.Footnote ¹⁰ The first street names were introduced in St Petersburg only in the 1730s, three decades after the city was founded. These names initially emerged in the usage of the population, without the intervention of the administration. Only in 1738/39 did the Commission on the Building of St Petersburg begin to officially assign street names. These efforts pertained only to some quarters of the city and did not have much lasting effect, as the official street names often competed with already established unofficial names. It was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that the administration tried again to systematically name all the city’s streets.Footnote ¹¹

The threefold founding of Orenburg

In Orenburg, however, the systematic naming of all streets occurred just one year after the city was founded. The fact that the city played a pioneering role among Russian cities is related to its founding history. From the very beginning, Orenburg was planned as a particularly representative city and as a symbol of Russia’s progressiveness vis-à-vis the nomadic population of the steppe. The treeless steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas were historically the domain of nomadic horsemen. For a long time these lands appeared alien and frightening to most Russians. However, from the middle of the sixteenth century, Russia gradually expanded its influence into the steppe. It established itself as a dominant regional power, gradually asserting suzerainty over various nomadic groups.Footnote ¹² According to the official Russian view, the Bashkirs became subjects of the tsars in the second half of the sixteenth century, and the Kalmyks followed a century later. In 1731, the Kazakhs of the so-called Lesser Horde were also accepted into the ranks of the Tsar’s subjects at the request of their Khan Abul Khair. However, Russian sovereignty over the Bashkirs and the Kalmyks was, at best, tenuous, and over the Kazakhs merely nominal thus far. The founding of Orenburg was therefore intended as a means to finally bring the nomads under the control of the Tsarist Empire.

Russians often referred to the steppes as an empty space, but this was obviously not the case. Rather, it was precisely the presence of the nomads in the region that, from a Russian point of view, made the construction of a fortress necessary. Remarkably, it was not Russian actors, but Abul Khair Khan, the Kazakh leader, who initially asked for the establishment of a Russian fortress in the region and proposed a location at the confluence of the Or’ and Yaik rivers. The latter delineated the border between Russia and the Central Asian steppes; today it is known as the Ural river. Abul Khair hoped that having his Russian allies present in the region would help him consolidate his authority within his own tribe.Footnote ¹³ It is possible that the idea of building a Russian fortress there was suggested to him by Aleksei I. Tevkelev, also known as Kutlu-Mohammed Tevkelev, a Tatar aristocrat in the service of the Russian Empire. The laurels for founding the city of Orenburg, however, were collected by the renowned Russian geographer Ivan K. Kirilov, who emerged as the main driving force behind the establishment of Orenburg. In a 1734 memorandum for Empress Anna Ivanovna, Kirilov postulated that a fortress at the confluence of the Or’ and Yaik rivers would serve to reinforce Russian control over Bashkir and Kazakh lands and facilitate Russia’s commercial and military expansion into Central Asia and, potentially, even further into India.Footnote ¹⁴ After the Empress received his proposal favourably, Kirilov led a substantial expedition to the Yaik region and officially established the city of Orenburg in August 1735. However, ultimately the entire undertaking proved disastrous as the expedition resulted in an uprising of the Bashkirs that lasted several years. In order to suppress the rebellion, Russian forces resorted to excessive violence. In addition, the location of the town was found to be unsuitable for a number of reasons, including its considerable distance from the nearest Russian settlements, which made the provision of supplies a challenging and costly endeavour. Furthermore, the location that Kirilov had selected was susceptible to significant flooding during the spring.Footnote ¹⁵

As a result, after several years, the decision was made to abandon the original plans to construct the town at that site. Instead, Orenburg was relocated downstream in 1741. The initial fortress was renamed Orsk and subsequently developed into a town of its own. However, the new location was also found to be unsuitable, and in 1743 the town was moved once more to its present location near the confluence of the Sakmara and Yaik rivers, more than 250 kilometres downstream of its initial site. A Cossack settlement, called Berdskaia Sloboda, had already existed at the new site for some time, and it was moved to a different location to make way for the construction of Orenburg. It is possible that an ancient mosque stood on the site of the future city, but it was not integrated into the city when construction of the fortress finally began in 1743.Footnote ¹⁶

By then Kirilov had been dead for some time. He had left Orenburg shortly after its founding at the first location and died in 1737. His immediate successors only stayed in office for a short time, and the driving force behind the last and final founding of the city became Ivan I. Nepliuev, who guided Orenburg’s fortunes until 1758. During his tenure, Orenburg became the centre of a vast province and subsequently emerged as the most important hub for administrative, military and economic interactions between the Tsarist Empire and Central Asia. It became the seat of the Orenburg Borderlands Commission, responsible for Kazakh affairs within the imperial bureaucracy. For at least a few years, it was also home to the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly, which was responsible for regulating the religious life of most of Russia’s Muslims. As Russia’s main military outpost in the region, Orenburg housed the troops to control the nomadic steppe population, and it was from here that the campaigns to subjugate Central Asia began in the second half of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Orenburg assumed a pivotal role in Russian trade with Central Asia. Merchants of Tatar and Central Asian origin settled within the environs of the city, and from the late eighteenth century also within the fortress area. While Orenburg had been primarily a military and administrative settlement in its early years, by the second half of the nineteenth century it had developed into a lively, multiethnic, multilingual and multireligious city.

The name ‘Orenburg’: Russia’s window to Asia

Although the city was successively established at three different locations, the name Orenburg was retained throughout the entire history of the town’s founding. The name had been given to the planned city in June 1734 in the founding charter of Empress Anna Ivanovna.Footnote ¹⁷ The designation referred to the river Or’, where the city was initially to have been founded. The fact that the name was not abandoned, even though the city was moved far away from the river that gave it its name, indicates that it was seen as a decisive element for the success of the future city.

Above all, it was the suffix ‘-burg’ that was intended to emphasize the particular significance of the new city. The German-sounding ending marked the planned city on the steppe frontier as a distinctively European project. In his concept for the city Kirilov had already suggested that it could be settled by European immigrants, and the privilege it was granted by the Empress provided it with self-government based on the model of European cities.Footnote ¹⁸ But more importantly, ‘-burg’ was an allusion to the new capital of St Petersburg, which Tsar Peter I had founded three decades earlier as Russia’s window to Europe.Footnote ¹⁹ Kirilov’s plan was for Orenburg to play a similar role as a window to Central Asia.Footnote ²⁰ But the name Orenburg was also part of a deliberate marketing strategy that presented the city on the Yaik river as a kind of posthumous project of the tsar himself. This appellation integrated the newly established city into a network of other Russian settlements, all of which terminated in ‘-burg’ and were collectively associated with the name of Peter I. The tsar had given names with this ending to half a dozen fortresses and towns that he had founded or conquered. These included the fortress of Schlüsselburg on Lake Ladoga, the mining settlement of Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains and the fortress of Oranienburg in the southern Russian lowlands between Moscow and Voronezh. The name on ‘-burg’ was therefore an attempt to mark the city on the Yaik as part of Peter’s legacy.Footnote ²¹ Thus, the designation Orenburg served to establish the city as an unmistakably European city, as an eastern counterpart to St Petersburg and as a kind of posthumous creation of Peter I. At the same time, it linked Russia’s southeastern frontier firmly to the empire, as it combined the steppe river Or’ with the imperial capital of St Petersburg.

Street names of 1744: the empire on site

When construction began at the city’s final location in the spring of 1743, it was based on a plan that Captain Luka Galafeev had drafted, together with the engineer Aleksei Tel’noi.Footnote ²² Just a year later, in July 1744, Governor Nepliuev decided that names should be given to the bastions of the fortress and the streets of the city. Nepliuev chose the names for some of the bastions and streets himself, while Galafeev made suggestions for the rest, which Nepliuev then endorsed.Footnote ²³ At that time, the construction of Orenburg had just begun. While numerous buildings had already been erected in the southern part of the city, large areas in the north were still completely undeveloped.Footnote ²⁴ Some of the streets that had been given names were therefore not yet visible in the cityscape, but their existence on the map was enough for them to be given an official name.

Orenburg’s street names were given early in another sense as well: in the 1740s, very few cities in the Tsarist Empire had official street names. In comparison with the historical cities of Russia, the assignment of street names in Orenburg was relatively easy to implement. The newly founded city had a geometrically regular street network that clearly distinguished it from most older towns and cities of the Tsarist Empire. In the urban development of pre-Petrine Russia, the street played only a subordinate role. More important factors in urban planning were the individual building, on the one hand, and the sloboda (the settlement or district as a whole), on the other. The street was merely considered the space between the buildings. Yet, spurred on by the reforms of Peter I, a new form of urban planning began to establish itself at the turn of the eighteenth century, which now took the street as its starting point.Footnote ²⁵

This development reached its first high point with the construction of Orenburg, where the entire urban space was structured by geometrically regular streets.Footnote ²⁶ The streets here were not just the product of the construction of buildings, but were laid out at the planning stage. The geometric structure of the city and the clear distinction between the street and building area enabled Galafeev to create a complete register of streets, which was the prerequisite for a systematic allocation of street names. Earlier than in other cities, the assignment of street names in Orenburg created the conditions for bureaucratic penetration of the urban space, even though we have no evidence that these street names were ever used in administrative practice. Generally speaking, Galafeev’s and Nepliuev’s naming of Orenburg’s streets in 1744 leaves an impression of sterility: all thoroughfares were referred to equally as streets, each with a preceding adjective. Moreover, Nepliuev and Galafeev drew on a small circle of thematic motifs. A large proportion of the street names were directly related to the military, such as Ofitserskaia (Officer) Street or Shtabskaia (Staff) Street. In this context, designations such as Under-Ofitserskaia (Junior Non-Commissioned Officer) Street or Soldatskaia (Soldier) Street show that soldiers of lower ranks were also honoured with their own street name. Another important source of inspiration for the street names were the places of origin of some of the first soldiers and settlers in the city, as names such as Ufimskaia (Ufa) or Alekseevskaia (Alekseevsk) streets illustrate. Several street names were derived from nearby churches, such as Preobra-zhenskaia (Transfiguration) or Voskresenskaia (Resurrection). Names like Gubernskaia (Governorate) or Komisskaia (Commission) streets referred to the imperial administration, and Goshpital’naia (Hospital) and Aptekarskaia (Pharmacy) streets commemorated some of the city’s newly established institutions.

While most of the street names belong to the category of imperial toponyms, as defined in the introduction to this special issue,Footnote ²⁷ it is significant that almost every street name referred in one way or another to the empire’s presence in the newly established city. The topographical designations showed that the imperial military had taken control of the region, that the city was settled by immigrants from various Russian cities, that they adhered to the Orthodox religion with its typical church names and that Orenburg was administered by a commission and a governor appointed by the imperial government. In a sense, this combination of local and imperial factors resembled the name of the city of Orenburg itself, which also linked the local Or’ river with the imperial capital of St Petersburg. Only one street name referred to the area before the founding of Orenburg: Berdskaia Street, which recalled the Cossack settlement on whose territory Orenburg was being built. However, not a single street name referred to the region’s nomadic population. That the latter had been a decisive factor in the founding of the city was not discernible from the street names. By rendering the non-Russian heritage of the region invisible on the map, imperial administrators marked the area as a previously empty region that was available for Russian settlement, comparable to the terra nullius European colonial powers identified in order to dispossess indigenous inhabitants of their lands in North America and Australasia.Footnote ²⁸ In a similar vein, Orenburg’s rectangular street grid also illustrated the disposability of space: only in the absence of any acknowledged claims on the land was it possible to implement a street grid that seemed to be governed solely by the laws of geometry.

There was only one street name given in 1744 that did not evoke the empire: Proezzhaia (Passage) Street. This name merely indicated that it was a thoroughfare leading to one of the gates in the fortifications. There was also only one street name that had no direct connection with local conditions: Petrovskaia (Peter’s) Street was named after Tsar Peter. The city’s imagined ties to Peter I were emphasized at the expense of Empresses Anna Ivanovna and Elizabeth Petrovna, who actually ruled Russia for most of Orenburg’s founding history but were not honoured with a street name.

The name Petrovskaia Street is also remarkable from a different perspective. The fact that a street was dedicated to the deceased tsar is an early example of the commemorative function of street names, which, according to cultural geographer Maoz Azaryahu, only became generally prevalent in the late eighteenth century in connection with the French Revolution.Footnote ²⁹ The same applies to Komisskaia Street, which referred to the recently dissolved Orenburg Commission, which had administered the city and the region until March 1744. Here, the memory of the city’s history was the decisive factor for the naming, and not the orientation towards institutions in the urban space.

The subordinate role played by the orientation function in the naming of streets is also evident from the fact that the institutions that served as inspiration for the names were by no means always directly located on the corresponding street. Thus, despite their names, Aptekarskaia and Goshpital’naia streets only passed near the pharmacy and the hospital, and did not lead directly to the institutions after which they were named (Figure 1). Moreover, these two streets prove that Galafeev’s naming system also made orientation difficult in another respect: both streets were divided into two parts without a direct connection. Although Orenburg’s street grid was laid out in a strict rectangular pattern, there were relatively few continuous streets. Most streets were interrupted by several transverse building blocks. Galafeev, however, interpreted such streets as a unit and gave them a common name. This led to streets located at different ends of the city sharing a name.

Figure 1. Orenburg, as planned in 1746. The naming of streets such as Aptekarskaia (Pharmacy) or Goshpital’naia (Hospital) shows that orientation was not the planners’ main priority. Neither street led directly to the institutions for which they were named but only passed close by them. In addition, both streets were divided into two parts that were not connected to each other. The example of Voskresenskaia (Resurrection) Church, Voskresenskaia Street and Voskresenskii Bastion demonstrates that the bastions were named after the streets, as only the street connected the bastion with its eponymous church. Source: Plan g. Orenburga, 1746, RGVIA, f. 349, op. 27/1, d. 2440. Map drawn by Louis Le Douarin based on data provided by the author.

All in all, the street names of 1744 and the way they were introduced reflected the idea of the steppe as a tabula rasa: the toponyms were given by administrative decree, with most of them having no connection to any given features on the ground or to local tradition. This approach became even more visible three decades later, after the region had been shattered by the Pugachev Rebellion. Empress Catherine II wanted to erase the memory of the Yaik Cossacks, who had participated in the uprising, and therefore ordered the renaming of the Cossacks and all topographical names containing the word Yaik. This included the Yaik river and all settlements connected with it, such as Verkhneyaitsk (Upper-Yaitsk). In all such cases the word Yaik was replaced by Ural, after the mountains where the river has its source. This gives us an idea of the extent to which the steppe was considered a tabula rasa, where the toponymic creativity of the imperial administrators knew no bounds and where the names of rivers could be changed at will. Moreover, with the erasure of the name Yaik, the region’s most prominent non-Russian toponym disappeared, since Yaik was a name of Turkic origin, meaning ‘outspread’ or ‘broad’.Footnote ³⁰ Just like the major Western European powers in their colonial territories, the Tsarist Empire thus pursued a policy of ‘toponymic silence’ regarding the indigenous cultures in its imperial peripheries. Ignoring their toponymic conventions rendered them invisible on the map.Footnote ³¹ The steppe was regarded as an empty space without any past of its own, and topographical designations were given and taken by the authorities. In this framework, street names served to symbolically make the region part of the empire.

Firm bastion names, fluid street names

The symbolic appropriation of the steppe by the empire is also reflected in the naming of the bastions of the Orenburg fortress. Generally, the naming of bastions was already a well-established practice in Russia at that time. A notable example is the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, whose bastions were named after the tsar and his comrades-in-arms.Footnote ³² But even before that, during the reconstruction of the recently conquered Ottoman fortress of Azov in 1697, the bastions were named after Peter and other important local players.Footnote ³³ In Orenburg, official names were given to the bastions at the same time as the streets in 1744.Footnote ³⁴ Essentially, the same pattern was used as for the streets: most bastion designations referred to institutions or persons that represented the empire in the steppe. Some, like Preobrazhenskii and Voskresenskii bastions, recalled the names of the nearby streets, which in turn had been named after churches. Other bastions referred to military facilities in their vicinity, such as the Proviantskii Bastion, which was named after the local provisions depot. Local military players were particularly prominent: in addition to Georg von Stockmann, the builder of the fortress, Nepliuev and Galafeev also each dedicated a bastion to themselves.

The naming of the bastions apparently followed that of the streets, as some of the bastion names were derived from nearby street names. This, however, led to a paradoxical situation when most of the streets were renamed around 1760. For example, Voskresenskii (Resurrection) Bastion bore the name of the planned Voskresenskaia Church, the construction of which started in 1746, and of Voskresenskaia Street, which led from the bastion to the site of the church (Figure 1). However, when the street was later renamed, the bastion lost its connection to the eponymous church (Figure 2). In order to correct this situation, there was an attempt to harmonize the naming of the bastions and the churches by renaming two of the bastions.Footnote ³⁵ However, the renaming did not gain acceptance, and the bastions continued to be called by their original names.Footnote ³⁶ This suggests that the names of the bastions had become firmly established, and that they were no longer taken to refer to another object but had acquired their own rights to the name.

Figure 2. Orenburg in 1760, after the first general renaming of streets. The street name Voskresenskaia has been transferred to the southern part of the former Goshpital’naia Street, while the former Voskresenskaia Street was renamed Troitskaia (Trinity) Street. The Voskresenskii Bastion thus lost its connection to the church of the same name. The former Proezzhaia Street was renamed Yaitskaia Street after the Yaitskie Gate, but both the street and the gate were colloquially known as Vodianye (Water) Street and Gate. Source: Aleksandr Rigel’man, Plan Orenburgskoj, 1760, RGVIA, f. 846, op. 16, d. 22298. Map drawn by Louis Le Douarin based on data provided by the author.

Generally, the ideological importance of bastions consisted in the fact that they represented the power and strength of the imperial state. They marked the borders of the city, and thus the transition from the wild fields of the steppe to the realm of the imperial troops, and so their names also had great symbolic significance for the entire fortress.Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, the bastion names had great importance in everyday life. Unlike the streets, the bastions were physical buildings in their own right. They had to be built, equipped and manned by soldiers. Therefore, for operational reasons, it was very important that each bastion could be identified by name. It is thus not surprising that the names of bastions became established far more quickly than the names of streets.

In fact, many of the street names that Nepliuev and Galafeev had solemnly bestowed in 1744 soon became obsolete. Presumably shortly after 1758, when Afanasii R. Davydov replaced Nepliuev as governor, numerous streets were renamed, as a 1760 map shows.Footnote ³⁸ The reasons for this are unknown. The only obvious advantage of the new names is that interrupted streets were now provided with separate names. It is possible that the new governor wanted to distinguish himself by giving the streets new names, but it is also conceivable that it was simply the result of a misunderstanding on the part of the administration. In any case, it was not a demonstrative renaming, like those following revolutions and regime changes, when a new regime strives to adapt topographical designations to new ideological requirements.Footnote ³⁹ Ideological reasons obviously did not play a role in Orenburg, as the renaming in no way marked a departure from the previous principles. The set of names remained essentially the same, and some street names even remained in use, but were simply applied to another street. For example, the former Voskresenskaia Street was now called Troitskaia (Trinity) Street, while the name Voskresenskaia Street was given to one of the neighbouring streets (Figure 2).

Yet, the administration’s toponymic efforts only related to the core area of the town within the fortress. As early as the mid-1750s, a Cossack settlement was established to the east of the fortress wall, in which mainly baptized Kalmyks settled. However, the streets in this settlement were apparently not given official names until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Street names (not) in use

The new street names of 1760 did not take hold immediately, as illustrated by a map from 1767, which still displayed the names from 1744.Footnote ⁴⁰ Moreover, the new street names competed not only with the old ones, but also with unofficial street names spontaneously given by the population. For example, Gubernskaia Street, the main street of the city, was commonly known simply as Bol’shaia Street (i.e. Big Street).Footnote ⁴¹ In some cases, colloquial names were eventually granted official recognition. This was the case with the abovementioned Proezzhaia Street. In about 1760 it was renamed Yaitskaia after the river Yaik, and in 1775 it was changed to Ural’skaia. However, despite these changes, it was generally called Vodianaia (Water) Street, as it led to the lowest point of the city territory, where water from the fortress could flow into the river. A map of 1751 already indicated that the gates at its lower end were called ‘Yaitskie or Vodianye Gates’, and in a map of 1836 the street was called ‘Ural’skaia or Vodianaia Street’. Later maps referred to this street only as Vodianaia Street.Footnote ⁴²

By the mid-nineteenth century, many of the streets had changed names again, and not a single street name from 1744 was still in use. But there are no apparent ideological reasons for these changes either. Some prominent streets were renamed in honour of high-ranking personalities – for example, Gubernskaia Street, Orenburg’s main street, was now called Nikolaevskaia Street in honour of the reigning Tsar Nicholas I. However, many other changes seem to have been made by chance. The frequent rearrangements of street names were both a symptom and a cause of their difficulty in becoming established in everyday life. In fact, most street names seem to have been used rarely. Most likely, they were not displayed on street signs,Footnote ⁴³ and until the second half of the nineteenth century, most city maps did not list street names at all. Instead, maps registered important buildings and institutions, which were primarily used for orientation purposes in the city.Footnote ⁴⁴ Street names hardly played a role in official administrative correspondence either. For example, when the poor structural condition of several public buildings in the town was discussed in 1799, no address was given in the file for any of the buildings.Footnote ⁴⁵ When an official map of the city was commissioned in 1860/61, extra research had to be carried out for some street names because there was no official record of them. In such cases, the street name was marked with comments like ‘according to old inhabitants’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In 1878, a detailed statistical description of the city of Orenburg was published, listing all the churches, schools, museums, hotels and monuments in the city, but this was done almost entirely without street names. Only the four most prestigious streets were mentioned by name, albeit not for orientation purposes, but rather as landmarks in their own right.Footnote ⁴⁷ A similar statistical description of 1891 managed entirely without street names.Footnote ⁴⁸ In fact, Orenburg’s street names served their orientation function poorly at that time, as a map from 1885 shows.Footnote ⁴⁹ Some streets had been renamed again in the meantime and now bore their fourth name. Moreover, there were also street names, such as the aforementioned Voskresenskaia Street, which had again changed place and now indicated a third street (Figure 3). Other street names, like Torgovyi (Commercial) Alley, were assigned to more than one street on the same map, which rendered them largely unusable.

Figure 3. Orenburg in 1885. The map shows that the city had grown and spread far beyond the former fortress area. Voskresenskaia Street, which had been moved from its original location (now called Troitskaia Street) to a parallel street (now Vvedenskaia Street) in around 1760, is now in an entirely new location outside the former fortress area. Inside the fortress area, a Muslim merchant community has appeared, mirrored by toponymics like Tatarskii (Tatar) Alley and Mechetnyi (Mosque) Alley. The mosque is located between these two streets. Source: Mezhevoe otdelenie Orenburgskogo kazach’ego voiska, ‘Plan goroda Orenburga’, 1885. Map drawn by Louis Le Douarin based on data provided by the author.

Apparently, as late as the second half of the nineteenth century, the street names were not in use by the population in everyday life or by the authorities. Therefore, the question arises as to why the streets were given official names at all if there was no actual need for them. The most plausible explanation lies in the city’s aspiration to be an eastern counterpart to St Petersburg and to showcase Russian civilization to steppe nomads. Thus, the allocation of street names in 1744 was mainly an ostentatious act intended to demonstrate the progressive nature of the administration. Accordingly, the main purpose of naming the streets was not to make it easier to find one’s way around the city or to set ideological markers by honouring certain persons or institutions in the urban space. Rather, the naming itself was a message intended to identify Orenburg as an enlightened city in which the latest techniques of governance were applied. In a way, a certain logic came into play here, which Azaryahu has described for topographic renaming after revolutionary regime changes. He characterized the renaming of streets as a relatively simple and inexpensive way of demonstrating a new regime’s ability to act.Footnote ⁵⁰ In a comparable way, the initial allocation of street names in Orenburg can also be understood as a demonstrative act mainly intended to showcase the administration’s advanced governing techniques. The topographical designations themselves, however, were of lesser importance.

While the administration in the eighteenth century apparently had attached great importance to the allocation of street names, the issue seemed to have lost relevance for the administration during the nineteenth century. This is indicated by the unsystematic naming documented on the 1885 map. Admittedly, systematic naming of streets was now much more difficult than it had been in the first decades after the city had been founded. The fortress had been dissolved in 1860 and the city had expanded enormously in the meantime. In many areas, the growth of the urban space was largely unplanned, so that the clear street structure characteristic of the old city centre was not continued. Now it was no longer so easy to discern whether a free space was actually a street or a square and thus had to be named, or whether it was just the space between buildings.

The system of street names was now less regulated than before. Where previously there had only been ‘streets’, there were now also ‘alleys’ or ‘squares’, and some streets were given no name at all. Apart from that, street names now covered a much broader thematic range. This reflected the societal development of the city. Orenburg had become a multinational and multireligious city, and from the beginning of the nineteenth century, several mosques had been built for Orenburg’s growing Muslim population.Footnote ⁵¹ The first of these was a mosque for the Tatar community, which was opened in 1805. A Tatar neighbourhood soon formed around it, which was reflected in street names such as Tatarskii (Tatar) Alley and Mechetnyi (Mosque) Street by the 1830s at the latest (Figure 3). At the end of the nineteenth century there was also a Bukharskii (Bukhara) Alley in the merchant quarter of the city, named after the Central Asian merchants who contributed to Orenburg’s flourishing as a trading hub. Finally, Karavansaraiskaia (Caravanserai) Street referred to the mosque built for the Bashkirs outside the fortress.Footnote ⁵² These new names mirrored the development Orenburg had undergone during the past century and a half. Orenburg had been founded as an isolated, quasi-colonial outpost which was dominated by the military. At that time, any indigenous dimensions of the city could be easily ignored, as Muslims and nomads were largely kept out of its walls. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, Orenburg had evolved into a flourishing imperial city.Footnote ⁵³ It was a commercial hub now with a vibrant multiethnic and multireligious population, which was also reflected in its street names.

All in all, by the end of the nineteenth century, street names were no longer as one-dimensional as they had been in the first decades of the city’s existence. Now they included many local features, and it seems that they did not indicate any nationalistic reservations. There were even some commemorative street names referring to non-Russian persons. Whether there were women among the numerous people after whom streets were now named cannot be determined with certainty, but it seems unlikely. Russia’s empresses, at least, still could not be found on the maps of the city.