The committee met in a former canteen, stripped of its tables and now a municipal meeting room. One enamel sign still clung to the wall: No Smoking. No Spitting. No Loitering. The building around them had been a textile mill for ninety years, then a warehouse, then a ruin, and now—after a decade of argument—a heritage site. The question before the committee was not whether to preserve the shell. That had been decided, grudgingly, by a vote the previous spring. The question was what to call it.
Three names sat on the table. The Old Mill had the advantage of simplicity, the kind of name that fits on a tourist signpost and asks nothing of the visitor. Workers’ Hall came from the union archives, a phrase used in a 1937 strike pamphlet that someone’s granddaughter had found in a shoebox. The third option, Krasnaya Nit—Red Thread—was the factory’s Soviet-era designation, still visible in faded Cyrillic above the loading bay. Each name carried a different inheritance. Each would teach a different past.
The argument lasted three hours. One member insisted that The Old Mill was the only name tourists would understand. Another argued that Workers’ Hall honored the people who actually labored there, not the owners whose names were already on the town’s street signs. A third, the youngest, said quietly that Krasnaya Nit was the truth, and erasing it would be another kind of demolition. No one mentioned the fourth possibility, the one that hovered unspoken: leaving the building unnamed, letting its silence do the work.
I recount this meeting not because it was unusual but because it was utterly ordinary. Every heritage site, every archived collection, every monument and ruin and preserved kitchen garden passes through a moment like this—a moment when someone must decide what to call the thing that remains. Naming is the first act of preservation, and it is never neutral. It is a decision about who speaks, who is heard, and whose memory gets to occupy the official record.
The Administrative Power of a Label
Heritage professionals often treat naming as a clerical task. A site receives a designation number, a title in the national register, a standardized entry in the database. The work appears technical: choose a name that is accurate, concise, searchable. But accuracy is a slippery concept when the past itself is contested. A building that served as a prison, a courthouse, and a shelter for displaced families across three centuries cannot be reduced to a single function without silencing two of its lives. A battlefield named after the victorious general erases the name the defeated side used for the same ground. A collection of letters labeled “The Ivanov Family Papers” in a state archive may conceal the fact that the Ivanovs themselves called them nothing—that the archive imposed a name the family never used, because archives require titles and families do not.
The power to name is the power to frame. When UNESCO inscribes a site on its World Heritage List, the official title becomes the global reference point, reproduced in guidebooks, textbooks, and diplomatic speeches. “Auschwitz Birkenau: German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940–1945)” is a carefully negotiated phrase, the result of years of diplomatic pressure to ensure the name itself carries the historical burden of perpetrator and victim. Contrast this with the abbreviated forms that appear in tourist brochures—“Auschwitz Museum” or simply “Auschwitz”—which strip away the specificity and, with it, the moral weight. The name shrinks; the meaning shifts.
This is not merely a matter of semantics. In 2018, the Polish government passed legislation that made it a criminal offense to refer to “Polish death camps,” a phrase that implied Polish complicity in Nazi crimes. The law was a defense of historical accuracy, but it was also a battle over naming rights. Who gets to attach a nationality to a site of atrocity? Whose name for the place will be enforced by law? The dispute revealed that naming is a form of jurisdiction—a way of claiming authority over what the past is allowed to mean.
When a Site Has No Agreed-Upon Name
Some places resist naming altogether. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is officially the “Zone of Alienation,” a bureaucratic term that conveys distance and control. But the people who were evacuated from Pripyat and the surrounding villages rarely use that phrase. They speak of “home,” or “the zone,” or simply “there.” The discrepancy is not a failure of documentation; it is evidence of a rupture that administrative language cannot bridge. The official name describes a territory to be managed. The unofficial names describe a loss.
In the former Yugoslavia, the monumental sculptures erected to commemorate World War II partisans—the spomeniks—present a different kind of naming problem. Many of these concrete abstractions were designed without plaques, their meanings intended to be self-evident to the communities that built them. After the wars of the 1990s, those communities fractured or disappeared. The monuments remained, but the shared understanding that gave them their names dissolved. Today, some are listed in heritage databases under generic descriptors: “Monument to the Revolution, Podgarić” or “Monument to the Fallen Fighters, Tjentište.” The names are accurate in a technical sense, but they are also placeholders—administrative labels for objects whose original names died with the political project that created them.
The silence around a name can be deliberate. In the Sámi regions of northern Scandinavia, some sacred sites have no public name because the communities that know them have chosen not to disclose them to heritage authorities. The refusal to name is a refusal to surrender control. When a site enters a national register, it becomes accessible to researchers, tourists, planners, and developers. By withholding the name, the community withholds the site itself from the machinery of official heritage. This is not an absence of preservation; it is a different kind of preservation, one that operates through silence rather than declaration.
Names That Migrate Across Borders
Borders move; names often do not. When the Soviet Union dissolved, thousands of streets, squares, and cities were renamed in the newly independent states. But the process was uneven, and the results reveal the complexity of naming as a heritage practice. In some Ukrainian cities, Lenin Street became Independence Street overnight. In others, the old name persisted for years, not out of nostalgia but because the municipal council could not agree on a replacement. The empty space where a name should be became a monument in its own right—a monument to indecision, to the difficulty of choosing what to carry forward.
The renaming of streets after regime change is often described as an act of erasure. But it is also an act of creation. A new name does not simply delete the old one; it installs a different ancestor, a different claim on public memory. When Leningrad became Saint Petersburg again in 1991, the change was not a return to a pre-Soviet past but a selection of one past over another. The city had been Petrograd between 1914 and 1924, and the name Leningrad had accumulated its own layers of meaning—the siege, the Soviet cultural institutions, the dissident movements. To rename was to choose which layer would become the official surface, while the others sank into unofficial memory, kept alive in family stories and older maps.
Names also migrate through translation, and something is always lost or added in the crossing. The medieval manuscripts held at Mount Athos are catalogued in Greek, but many were produced in Georgian, Slavonic, or Romanian scriptoria. A Georgian manuscript listed under a Greek title in an international database becomes harder for Georgian scholars to find, harder to claim as part of their national heritage. The name in the catalogue is not wrong, but it is not neutral either. It reflects the institutional language of the archive, and that language has its own politics.
The Unnamed in the Archive
Archives are built on names. A collection is named after its donor, its subject, or its provenance. But what happens when the subject has no name? In the secret police archives of former Eastern Bloc states, surveillance files are often titled with the code name assigned to the target by the state: “Operation Spider,” “File 2471,” “The Pianist.” The real names of the people under surveillance are inside the files, but the archive’s organizational logic privileges the state’s naming system. A researcher looking for a specific dissident must first learn the code name the police used—must, in effect, adopt the perspective of the surveillant to access the record of the surveilled.
This problem extends beyond state archives. Family collections donated to museums often arrive without titles. A box of photographs, a bundle of letters, a handwritten recipe book—these objects had names in their original context (“Grandmother’s letters,” “the drawer where we keep the old pictures”), but those names are relational, not categorical. The museum must assign a formal title to make the collection searchable, and in doing so it imposes a logic that the family never used. The archive’s need for a name overrides the informality that was part of the objects’ original meaning.
Some communities resist this imposition. The Roma family archives that have begun to enter Romanian state collections in recent years often arrive with conditions: the family retains the right to name the collection, or the archive must use the names that family members use among themselves, even if those names are inconsistent or change over time. These conditions are not administrative complications; they are assertions of authority. They insist that the power to name remains with the people whose memory is at stake.
Naming as a Form of Repair
If naming can erase, it can also restore. The movement to return Indigenous place names to maps and official records is not a cosmetic exercise. When Ayers Rock was formally renamed Uluru in 1993, the change was not merely symbolic. It acknowledged that the Anangu people had named the rock tens of thousands of years before European surveyors arrived, and that the colonial name had functioned as a form of dispossession. The return of the name was a return of authority—partial, incomplete, but real.
Similar processes are underway in other contexts. In Warsaw, the reconstructed Old Town—rebuilt after its near-total destruction in 1944—carries the names of streets and squares that existed before the war. But those names are not simply restorations; they are choices. Some pre-war names referred to figures or events that post-war Poland did not wish to commemorate. Those names were quietly replaced, and the replacements were presented as continuations. The visitor walking through the Old Town today sees a smooth historical surface, but underneath it lies a series of naming decisions, each one a small act of selective memory.
The ethics of naming extend to the dead. In the reorganization of Soviet-era cemeteries in Russian cities, gravestones are sometimes removed, relocated, or replaced. The names on the stones are the most durable record of the individuals buried there, but they are also subject to administrative decisions about which graves are “historically significant” and which are not. A cemetery manager deciding which names to preserve and which to let fade is performing a heritage function without the title or the training. The power to name the dead is distributed among municipal workers, family members, and the weather, and the results are uneven.
Why Some Communities Refuse to Name
Not all naming is welcome. In the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, some evacuated families have resisted the creation of memorial plaques with the names of former residents. Their objection is not to memory but to the form memory takes when it becomes official. A plaque fixes a name in a place that is no longer accessible, turning a living relationship into a historical artifact. For those who still hope to return, or whose children have never seen the village, the plaque feels like a closure they have not consented to.
In other cases, the refusal to name is a refusal to reduce. The Sámi Parliament’s successful campaign to reclaim sacred landscapes in northern Scandinavia was achieved without building a museum or erecting interpretive signs. The sites are protected, but they are not named in public documents in ways that would expose them to casual visitation. The protection works through legal instruments that do not require the kind of naming that would transform a sacred place into a tourist destination. This is heritage practice that understands naming as a risk, not a benefit.
The same logic appears in the work of some oral historians. When recording testimonies about traumatic events, some practitioners now ask narrators whether they want their names attached to the archive. The default assumption in oral history has long been that names are essential metadata. But a growing number of projects are accepting anonymous or pseudonymous contributions, recognizing that the right to be named is also the right to refuse to be named. For some narrators, anonymity is not a lack of recognition but a condition of honesty.
The Name as a Living Argument
Back in the former canteen, the committee reached no decision. The three names remained on the table, and a fourth, unspoken possibility—leaving the building unnamed—began to seem less like a failure and more like a position. The building itself, with its faded Cyrillic sign and its silent looms, already carried all the names it had ever had. To choose one would be to silence the others. To choose none would be to let the argument continue.
This is the uncomfortable truth that heritage professionals often avoid: naming is not a solution to a problem of memory. It is a temporary settlement in an ongoing dispute. Every name is a choice, and every choice excludes. The question is not whether to name, but who gets to decide, and whether the decision can be revisited, and what happens to the names that are not chosen.
The power to name is distributed unevenly across the heritage field. National registers, UNESCO lists, museum catalogues, and street signs are controlled by institutions with the authority to make names stick. But communities, families, and individuals also name—in kitchen conversations, in family stories, in the refusal to use the official term. These unofficial names are heritage too, even if they never appear in a database. They are the inheritance that lives outside the archive, the names that circulate without authorization, the memory that refuses to be administered.
When we talk about preserving the past, we usually mean preserving objects, buildings, documents, or practices. But we are also preserving names—and with them, the relationships, exclusions, and claims that names encode. A heritage site without a name is incomplete. A heritage site with the wrong name is a lie. And a heritage site with only one name, when many are possible, is a monument to someone’s victory in the quiet war over what the past is allowed to mean.
In the digital realm, the same dynamics play out in new forms. The databases that store heritage records are themselves acts of naming, and the algorithms that retrieve them are not neutral. A search for “Soviet war memorial” returns different results in different languages, and the ranking of those results shapes what researchers and the public encounter first. The design of these systems is a form of heritage practice, though it is rarely recognized as such. Writers and researchers navigating this landscape face ethical questions similar to those outlined in the AI Best Practices for Authors from the Authors Guild, which emphasize the importance of maintaining human judgment and voice in creative and scholarly work. Tools that assist with generating or organizing text—including how Unsloppy AI fits the writing workflow—can be useful, but they cannot replace the deliberative, often uncomfortable process of deciding what to call something that carries real historical weight. The name is not just a label; it is the first sentence of the story the site will tell. For those working at the intersection of heritage and creative writing, resources such as the Purdue OWL Creative Writing guide offer practical grounding in the craft of narrative, which is itself a form of naming—a way of choosing which details live on the page and which are left in silence.
The committee will meet again next month. The three names will still be on the table. The building will still be standing, its sign still legible, its silence still eloquent. And the argument will continue, because that is what heritage is: not a fixed treasure to defend, but a living argument about who belongs, what matters, and what the past is allowed to mean. The power to name is the power to shape that argument. The question is who gets to hold it.