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Abstract
The capital cities of Eastern and Central Europe form an interesting group for further analysis since, so far, the main focus for research on capital cities has been on the major modern Western powers in Europe. One is less aware of the fact that the capitals of Central and Eastern Europe were closely networked with the big European cities before 1914. After the end of the Cold War in 1981–91, a closer European co‐operation led to the rethinking of the ‘Western’ versus ‘Eastern’ influences on local identity. The capital cities in Central and Eastern Europe played an essential role in national movements and in the creation of new political identities. The intention here is to illustrate how these capital cities are presented to the outside world today. The ‘Westernization’ of urban symbols and identities are analysed by examining current internet websites. Web‐pages play a central role in providing direct and fast information, especially related to countries, cities and places. A comparative analysis shows how uniform the ‘Europeanization’ of the urban history of capital cities of this part of Europe has been. The cities are in constant transformation with new building projects and restoration plans. These projects articulate the new international and national standing of the cities. The images of capital cities on websites show how ‘Western’ urban values, local narratives and their own past are argued for in the transformation of the city image.
Notes
1. According to the recent listing of independent states the countries in Europe include Albania, Andorra, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Republic of Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Vatican City (Holy See). See http://en.wikipedia.org.wiki.
2. One of the main focuses of research on nationalism at the beginning of the 1990s was how revitalized nationalism affected the guidelines for relating how the states came to be. M. Fulbrook (ed.), National Histories & European History. London: UCL Press, 1993. T. Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations. Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569–1999. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003. On new transurban movements: K. Schlögel, Marjampole oder Europas Wiederkehr aus dem Geist der Städte. Hanser, 2005.
3. L. Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992, p. 273.
4. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) defined ‘Metropolis’ as the ‘mother city’, coming from the Greek meter. See L. Peltz, Aestheticizing the Ancestral City: antiquarianism, topography and the representation of London in the long eighteenth century, in D. Arnold (ed.) The Metropolis and its Image. Constructing Identities for London c. 1750–1950. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999, pp. 6–9.
5. This collection of definitions is made by the author, based on the following publications: [Agrave]. Ságvári and E. C. Harrach (eds), The Capitals of Europe. A Guide to the Sources for the History of their Architecture and Construction. Munich: K. G. Saur Verlag KG, 1980; D. Gordon (ed.), Planning Twentieth Century Capital Cities. London: Routledge, 2006; L. Nilsson (ed.), Capital Cities. Images and Realities in the Historical Development of European Capital Cities. Studier in stads‐ och kommunhistoria/22, Stockholm: Stads‐ och kommunhistoriska institutet, 2000; Th. Schieder and G. Brunn, Hauptstädte in europäischen Nationalstaaten. Studien zur Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Band 12, Wien: R. Oldenburg Verlag, 1983; W. Sonne, Representing the State. Capital City Planning in the Early Twentieth Century. Munich: Prestel, 2004; Werner Süss (Hrsg.), Hauptstadt Berlin, Band I: Nationale Hauptstadt – Europäische Metropole. Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1983; J. Taylor, J. G. Lengellé and C. Andrew (eds), Capital Cities. International Perspectives. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1993; G. Therborn, Monumental Europe: The National Years of the Iconography of European Capital Cities. Housing, Theory and Society, 19 (2002) 26–47.
6. To mention some research in the field: C. Tilly and W. P. Blockmans (eds), Cities & the Rise of States in Europe A.D. 1000 to 1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. It does not pay any particular attention to capital city formation. The same concerns A. Sutcliffe’s Towards the Planned City. Germany, Britain, the United States and France 1780–1914. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981. Also P. M. Hohenburg and L. Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe 1000–1950 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985) discusses quite little directly of the development of capital cities.
7. The research literature on separate capital cities is vast. Also city museums and archives, tourist boards, municipal governance, local historical societies etc. produce books and articles on the history of individual capital cities. The comparative aspect is usually very modest and the national aspect is evident. Also see a detailed bibliography of urban history by Comission Internationale pour l’Histoire des Villes, by professor P. Wolff, Guide International d’Histoire Urbaine (1979).
8. J‐P. Panslas‐Descours and M. Velly, Panoramas Européens. Paris: Picard, 2000.
9. See T. Hall’s monumental book Planning Europe’s Capital Cities. Aspects of Nineteenth Century Urban Developments (London: Spon, 1997). A. Almandoz (ed.), Latin American Capital Cities Planning. London: Routledge, 2002; S. V. Ward, Planning the Twentieth‐Century City. The Advanced Capitalist World. Chichester: Wiley, 2002; M. Wagenaar, Stedebouw en burgerlijke vrijheid. De contrasterende carrières van zes Europese hoofdsteden. Bussum: Uitgeverij Thoth, 2001; W. Sonne, op. cit. [5]; D. Gordon, op. cit. [5].
10. P. Hall, The Changing Role of Capital Cities: Six Types of Capital City, in J. Taylor et al. (eds), op. cit. [5].
11. P. Clark and B. Lepetit (eds), Capital Cities and their Hinterlands in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot: Scolar 1996.
12. L. Vale, The Urban Design of 20th Century Capitals, in D. Gordon (ed.), op. cit. [5].
13. P. Hall, Cities in Civilization. Culture, Innovation and Urban Order. London: Phoenix, 1998. I. Mieck (Hrsg.), Paris und Berlin in der Restaurationszeit 1815–1830. Soziokulturelle und ökonomische Strukturen im Vergleich. Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1996. The articles are based on the first Paris–Berlin‐Colloquium in 1990.
14. E. Blau and M. Platzer (eds), Shaping the Great City. Modern Architecture in Central Europe 1890–1937. Munich: K.G. Saur Verlag KG, 1999.
15. Prague (Bohemia), Brünn/Brno (Moravia), Lemberg /L’viv (Galicia), Agram/Zagreb (Croatia‐Slavonia), Laibach/Ljubljana (Carniola), Czernowitz/Cernivci (Bukovina) and Hermanstadt/Nagyszeben (Transsylvania). Many of these provincial capitals became also important ‘national’ cultural capitals and important university towns, as well as centres of avant‐garde. See E. Blau and M. Platzer (eds), ibid., pp. 110–16 (Budapest), 117–24 (Prague) and 136–44 (Zagreb). On the change of names in different times and languages T. Snyder, op. cit. [2], p.xi.
16. H. Meller, European Cities 1890–1930s. History, Culture and the Built Environment. Chichester: Wiley, 2001, pp. 78–83.
17. J. Musil, Urbanization in Socialist Countries. London: Croom Helm, 1981, p. 127.
18. Ibid., pp. 149–52.
19. During the years more interest has been directed towards socialist planning and architecture and research is starting to focus on these themes also in Eastern and Central Europe. D. M. Smith, The Socialist City and I. Szelenyi, Cities under Socialism – and After, in G. Andrusz, M. Harloe and I. Szelenyi (eds) Cities in Socialism. Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post‐Socialist Societies. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. M. Kalm, The Sovietization of Baltic Architecture. Industry and Modernism, special edition of Yhdyskuntasuunnittelu 3 (2003) 42–51. One of the best ‘Western’ analyses of the Eastern European communist architecture and urbanism is by a Swedish art historian: Anders Åman, Arkitektur och ideologi i stalintidens Österopa. Ur det kalla krigets historia. Malmö: Carlssons, 1979, with English summary. The complete work is available in English as Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era: An Aspect of Cold War History. New York/Cambridge MA: The Architectural Foundation/MIT Press, 1992. References in this paper are to the original Swedish edition. Åman’s theme is the development of architecture in ‘East Europe’ understood as the six People’s Democracies of the GRD, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
20. M. Lewicka, Architecturatlas der Altstadt von Warschau. Krakow, 1992. H. Nicolaus and A. Obeth, Die Stalinallee. Geschichte einer deutschen Strasse. Berlin, 1997.
21. M. Kalm, op. cit. [19], pp. 44–5, 49–50. A. Åman, op. cit. [19], pp. 278–80.
22. According to the German word Lungenheilanstalten.
23. A. Åman, op. cit. [19], pp. 281–3.
24. M. Klinge, The Baltic World. Keuruu: Otava, 1997, pp. 166–8. M. Fulbrook, op. cit. [2], pp. 13–16. P. Corneij and J. Pokorny, A Brief History of the Czech Lands to 2004. Prague: Paseka, 2003; R. Pullat, All Roads Led to Tallinn. History of Old Tallinn. Tallinn: Perioodika, 1998.
25. J. Jauhiainen, Transition and Boundaries. Postmodernisation of the Economic Geography of ‘the East’, in H. Marjanen (ed.) Jaakko Saviranta – talousmaantieteen monitaituri. Turku: Turun kauppakorkeakoulun julkaisuja C 3, 1998a, pp. 43–56.
26. M. Åberg, History, Nationalism, and the Rethinking of Cities in the Baltic Sea Area. Implications for Regionalisation and Cross‐Border Cooperation, in M. Åberg and M. Peterson (eds) Baltic Cities. Perspectives on Urban and Regional Change in the Baltic Sea Area. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 1997, pp. 113–16.
27. W. Schramm, Towards a Common Urban Development Policy for the Baltic Sea Region, in Baltic Cities. Global Aspects on Urban Settlements in the Baltic Sea Region. Report from an International Conference, May 1997, Stockholm: The Swedish Council for Building Research, 1998, pp. 33–41. M. Åberg and M. Peterson (eds), ibid., pp. 12–14.
28. P. Rietbergen, Europe. A Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1998) analyses how the political and cultural concept of Europe has been used by the intellectual elite more specifically ‘whenever there was cause to give a more precise definition of what can pragmatically yet simply be described as the western edge of Eurasia’ (pp. xvii–xx). This book typically thus records cultural developments in the west of the ‘transitional zone’, giving little attention to the Baltic and the Balkans, and present‐day states of Poland, Czech and Slovak Republics and Hungary.
29. The main reference to the general chronology of ‘European history’ here is J.‐B. Duroselle, Europe. A History of its Peoples (London: Penguin Group, 1990, p. 20). It is a general one‐volume history of Europe and it was published simultaneously in most European languages. Support to the project was provided by the European Commission. Also, M. Fulbrook, op. cit. [2], p. 2.
30. This pattern is certainly present in European encyclopaedic tradition, see for example Encyclopedia Britannica. First, a description of a city’s geographical location, natural surroundings, population and settlement. Then something on traffic and ‘cultural life’, city image and sights. A large part of the text is devoted to governance and history. See a chronological historical pattern in The Capitals of Europe (1980, op. cit. [5]). A modern version is the exhibition catalogue of J‐P. Pranlas‐Descours and M. Velly, op. cit. [7].
31. In visiting the web‐pages of Scandinavian capital cities the concentration is more on the municipal structure than on telling the history or narrative. See www.helsinki.fi, www.stockholm.se, www.kk.com and www.oslo.kommune.no.
32. Recent Finnish research in this field is provided by T. A. Äikäs, Imagosta maisemaan. Esimerkkinä Turun ja Oulun kaupunki‐imagojen rakentaminen. Oulu: Nordia Geografical Publication, vol. 30, 2, 2001. See also M. H. Port, Government and the metropolitan Image: ministers, parliament and the concept of a capital city, 1840–1915, in D. Arnold (ed.) op. cit. [4], pp. 111–23.
33. M. Rady, Core and periphery: Eastern Europe, in M. Fulbrook (ed.), op. cit. [2], pp. 162–77.
34. Excellent recent research on the contemporary identifications of St Petersburg (an idealized Old Imperial Russia onto the post‐Soviet city) is presented in E. Hellberg‐Hirn, Imperial Imprints. Post‐Soviet St Petersburg. Jyväskylä 2003: SKS/Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran toimituksia 920, 2003.
35. This is, of course, also the case in many non‐European cities. This section is based on the analysis of different histories of European capital cities in the book The Capitals of Europe, op. cit. [5]. Also see S. Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991.
36. On Zagreb see the official tourist pages www.zagreb‐convention.hr/conv.php?e=&n=1&i=2.
37. Exhibition and its publication in 1998, Vattenstäder Sankt Petersburg – Stockholm, Stockholm: Museum of Architecture, clearly show the importance of ‘the water element’ in the planning of the both capital cities.
38. It is convenient here to refer to the famous work of F. Braudel on the Mediterranean sea but see also modern research: M. Klinge, The Baltic World. Helsinki: Otava Publishing Company Ltd, 1997; M. Åberg and M. Peterson, op. cit. [26]. See S. E. Rasmussen, Kobenhavn. Et bysamfunds saerpraeg og utvikling gennem tiderne. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2001; L. Nilsson (ed.), Staden på vattnet I‐II. Stockholm: Stockholmia, 2002. M. Klinge and L. Kolbe, Helsinki – The Daughter of the Baltic Sea. Helsinki: Otava Publishing Company Ltd, 1999.
39. C. Magris, Danubio. Roma: Garzanti Editore s.p.a, 1986.
40. 100 Most Beautiful Cities of the World. A journey across five continents (2nd edn). Munich: Rebo International, pp. 72–3.
41. M. Csáky and E. Mannová, Collective Identities in Central Europe in Modern Times. Bratislava: Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, 1999. M. Csáky, Multicultural Communities: Tensions and Qualities. The Example of Central Europe, in E. Blau and M. Platzer (eds), op. cit. [14], pp. 43–54.
42. J.‐B. Duroselle, op. cit. [29], p. 17.
43. See www.ljubljana.slo.
44. I. Szelenyi, op. cit. [19], pp. 286–317.
45. 100 Most Beautiful Cities of the World, op. cit. [40], pp. 82–3.
46. See www.sofia.com/history.
48. E. Blau and M. Platzer (eds), op. cit. [14], pp. 19–20.
49. See www.sofia.com/history.
50. M. Klinge, op. cit. [24], pp. 141–7; E. Blau and M. Platzer (eds), op. cit. [14], pp. 33–6.
51. Tommy Book, Symbolskiften i det politiska landskapet. Namn – heraldik – monument (Motala: Acta Wexionensia nr 3/2000, Geografi, 2000) deals with geographical names, heraldry, monuments, political landscape, manipulation and acceptance in Eastern Europe.
52. Illustrations of these coats of arms can be found on the cover of The Capitals of Europe, op. cit. [5] and on internet pages on different capital cities.
53. T. Book, op. cit. [51], p. 186.
54. A valuable web‐page for international civic arms is www.ngw.nl, including presentations of many coats of arms of European cities.
56. E. Hellberg‐Hirn, op. cit. [34], pp. 280–3 gives an interesting presentation on the mythical role of the three central figures in St Petersburg/Leningrad history, namely Peter the Great, Pushkin and Lenin.
57. A. Kolbergs, The Story of Riga. History of Riga Old Town. Riga: Ajag Seta Publishers & Printers Ltd, 1998.
58. Inside Guides: Prague. APA Publications, 2004, p. 21.
59. G. Kearns and C. Philo (eds), Selling Places. The City as Cultural Capital, Past and Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. See also C. Landry, The Creative City. A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan Publications, 2000.
60. L. Kolbe, Helsinki kasvaa suurkaupungiksi. Julkisuus, politiikka, hallinto ja kansalaiset. Helsingin historia 3 (Helsinki: Edita Publishing, 2002) describes how the special Helsinki Day (12 June) was invented in 1950, when the celebration of Helsinki’s 400th anniversary was a grand national occasion. Later in 1959, a yearly Helsinki Day tradition was started, pp. 92–6, 151–3. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 7th edition, 1992.
61. T. Book, op. cit. [51], pp. 182–5.
63. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk.