Past approaches to ideological commemorative street naming have taken for granted the concept of ideology, focusing on the policy decisions and the debates surrounding individual and more concerted resemioticizations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the concept of ideology in the context of commemorative street renaming is by no means unequivocal by illustrating how different decisions on what is or is not an ideological street name change influences the shape and the scope of “the ideological robe of the city” (Zieliński 1994). More specifically, we report on methodological decisions and their implications for representational politics in two towns, Zbąszyń in Poland and Annaberg-Buchholz in Germany, during consecutive waves of regime changes since the First World War. We rely on the visualisation of geographical patterns to illustrate the outcomes of different definitions of ideology and explore how different definitions affect our analysis. Our primary aim is to arrive at systematic, and thus supra-locally operationalizable, analytical procedure for distinguishing ideological from non-ideological street naming practices.