Table Of ContentHISTORICAL CONTEXT, MEANINGS AND CHANGES
JOHN EVERETT-HEATH
OF THE W O R LD
HISTORICAL CONTEXT, MEANINGS AND CHANGES
J O HN E V E R E T T - H E A TH
©John Everett-Heath, 2000.
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Published in the United Kingdom by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD, 2000
Brunei Road, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hants RG21 6XS
London and Oxford
Companies and representatives throughout the world
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:
Everett-Heath, John
Place names of the world Europe: historical context, meanings and changes
1. Names, Geographical - Europe
2. Names, Geographical - Europe - History
I. Title
914'.0014
ISBN 978-1-349-41744-5 ISBN 978-0-230-28673-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230286733
Distributed by Macmillan Distribution Ltd
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Published in the United States and Canada by
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St. Martin's Press ISBN 978-1-56159-300-2
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Typeset by The Florence Group, Stoodleigh, Devon
Belgium 19
Bosnia-Hercegovina 25
Bulgaria 33
Croatia 43
Cyprus 51
Czech Republic, The 57
Denmark 67
Estonia 77
Finland 83
France 91
Germany 109
Greece 127
Hungary 137
Iceland 145
Ireland 149
Italy 157
Latvia 175
Lithuania 181
Luxembourg 189
Macedonia 193
Moldova 199
Netherlands, The 203
Norway 213
Place Names of the World - Europe
Ukraine 327
United Kingdom 341
Yugoslavia 365
Select Bibliography. 379
Index 383
vi Place Names of the World - Europe
Europ
The Balkans 1878 36
The Disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire 1920 62
The Plantagenet Lands 1154-1300 95
The German Confederation 1815 116
The Ottoman Empire in Europe 1683 141
The Kingdom of Italy 1861 162
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569 185
The Partitions of Poland 1772,1793,1795 224
The Disintegration of the Soviet Union 1991 257
Former Yugoslavia 1999 370
The Descendants of Queen Victoria 363
Place Names of the World - Europe vii
Stephen Ramsey should be congratulated for turning my very rough drafts into such
excellent maps and my editor, Diana Levy, who performed wonders in preparing the book for
publication. I owe a special debt of thanks to Andrea Hartill, my publisher, for her constant
encouragement and advice throughout.
Lastly, I must thank my wife who has not just tolerated the diversion of my attention, but
done everything possible to ease the gestation of this work.
viii Place Names of the World - Europe
peace, of life and death to nations.
The ways in which a place gets its name are many and varied, but there is no inhabited place,
however obscure, without a name. Many have a meaning, but it may not be known now or it
may be disputed. Different theories are put forward and often there is little likelihood of the
matter being resolved.
A place may take its name from the person who discovered it, for example, Tasmania, or from
an individual to be honoured, such as Gagarin, Kimberley and Washington. A country may be
named after the people who inhabited it (not necessarily its first inhabitants), such as France or
Slovakia. So-called folk names are quite common. Amiens is named after the Ambiani tribe,
Alsace (Elsazzun) means 'those living on the outside' (that is, west of the Rhine), and Bohemia
is named after the Boii. Many towns have been named after saints, for example St Albans,
particularly if they were founded on the saint's feast day.
A town or even a country may owe its name to a local natural resource, silver in the case of
Srebrenica in Bosnia, or a natural feature such as the Turkish town of Trabzon which takes its
name from the Greek word trapeza, table, a reference to the flat-topped mountain close by. Quite
often places are named after the river on which they lie and are therefore based on the local and
contemporary word for water. Rijeka simply means river. Some names are descriptive like
Chad, meaning lake, or Japan, land of the rising sun; others are often somewhat unimaginative:
Naples (Neapolis) and Novgorod are nothing more than 'New Town' while Nowa Huta in Poland
simply means 'New Steelworks', a town built to house the workers at the nearby steel mills.
Countries that have gained independence from a colonial power have often retained names
originally transferred from the home country by their former rulers. This is especially
prevalent in the United States and the former Commonwealth dominions of Australia, Canada,
New Zealand and South Africa. In some cases, however, names were changed: Salisbury in
Southern Rhodesia became Harare in Zimbabwe. New names can be contrived: Pakistan comes
from the initials of Punjab, Afghanistan and .Kashmir with the Persian word stan, land, added.
For new governments coming to power and wishing to make an impact, or when they acquire
new territory by conquest or peace treaty, the temptation to change names can be difficult to
resist. The desire to exorcise the past can be very strong and changing names can be a method
of underpinning the new 'legitimacy'. The clearest example of this was the Soviet Union's wish,
almost mania, to eradicate the imperial era while honouring the heroes of the Bolshevik
Revolution, only to be followed by the Russian impulse to rid itself of these trappings of its
communist past after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Language is very often the key to finding the origin of a name. Some require little more
than a straight-forward translation. Brod in Croat can mean a ford so Slavonski Brod means
Place Names of the World - Europe ix
