Analyzing the toponymy of historical Petrópolis-RJ/Brazil Maps: A discussion about the German colonization
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Boruchovitch Fonseca, T.; 2V.g. Didier, I.; 3Pereira de Souza, B.C.; 4do Couto Fernandes, M.
1UFRJ
2UFRJ Email: ingrid.didier@gmail.com
3UFRJ Email: biasouza91@gmail.com
4UFRJ Email: manoel.fernandes@ufrj.br
Abstract
Petrópolis, a city located in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was founded on the 19th century to become the Summer residence Palace of the Brazilian Court. Some geographic aspects of the location were very important in this choice, such as the weather, the geomorphology and the proximity to the empire capital, Rio de Janeiro. As a city born from nowhere, there was a need for a solid plan of occupation. Major Frederico Koeler, who was German, developed this plan. It was indeed a very complex urban plan based on two main types of the occupation of a German colonization: Villages and Blocks. Those places were divided into pieces of land for the colons to rent. Major Koeler made a cartographic register of his plan, called “Planta Petrópolis”, which we intend to analyze the toponymy. Toponymy is the study of geographical names, a very multidisciplinary theme, that is connected to various areas like linguistic studies, geography, cartography, politics, cultural studies, etc. The geographical names are not randomly chosen, which implicates that they are culturally constructed and have a lot to tell about the social-spatial relations involved in this choice. So, our main objective in this paper is to present the geographical names of the Villages and Blocks chosen by Major Koeler and their relations with the Germanic families who arrived in Petrópolis in the mid eighteenth century. For this purpose, first of all, a research on the theme and developed some theoretical reflections was done. We carried out some field studies, on Municipal Library of Petrópolis and Real Estate Company of Petrópolis. Finally, we tried to compare the original location of the colons, and the block or village where they were place on Petrópolis. We found out that the majority of names were transplanted toponymies from German. At first, we analyzed only the people who were from the places that had their name transplanted to blocks on Petrópolis and compare if they had been allocated on the block with the same name of their original cities. There was no strict co-relation, an irrelevant number of them received pieces of land on the block that had the name of the city they were from. In the second analysis of co-relation between the colons’ origin and the blocks and villages names, we searched for the location of all of the cities the colons were originated on the German Map. We found out that 95% of them were located on the same three states that concentrated the transplanted names.
Keywords
Toponymy; Petrópolis; German Colonization