After almost 19 years of double names on the streets, the Constitutional Court annulled the decision by which the Council of the Municipality of Tetovo renamed the city's streets, squares, bridges and public buildings in 2007. The reason is as simple as it is old as the decision itself - the municipality did it without the government's consent, which the law requires.

The people of Tetovo live the result of that inconsistency every day: municipal documents used one set of names, while state documents - ID cards, passports - used another. Nineteen years of administrative chaos because one council decided on its own, without seeing the procedure through to the end.

Among the disputed renamings were the „Marshal Tito“ boulevard and square turned into „Ilirija“, „JNA“ street into „Dervish Cara“, and „29 November“ street into „Mehmet Pasha Derala“. The constitutional initiative was filed in February 2025 by Darijan Sotirovski and the Association of Fighters from the WWII People's Liberation War - Tetovo.

Politics has always stood behind street names, and that's no secret anywhere in the Balkans. But the point of this ruling isn't which name is „correct“ - it's that no authority, local or central, may skip the procedure and leave citizens to live for 19 years with two truths in two different documents. Who will answer for those two lost decades?