As every Hungarian and a surprising number a foreigners know, the great riverside industrial city today known as Dunaújváros was officially known during a decade-long dark stretch of the communist era as “Sztálinváros,” or “Stalin City.” But judging from a bizarre pic snapped yesterday by reader pytey (link to original shot) it seems that whoever is feeding the local weather info into our local iPhones didn’t get the memo about the de-Stalinization of Stalin City, which happened way back in 1961:
Hello,
I know most iPhone owners are liberal Macintosh users (like myself), but I didn’t think that the iPhone was _that_ left wing. Please find attached the image of my wife’s iPhone trying to display the weather of Dunaújváros using the Apple weather application.
Cheers, pytey.
And people still wonder why after all these years some Hungarian anti-communists are still seeing red…
the weather widget is based on Yahoo’s meterology database and is only ported by Apple onto the iPhone
cheers!
There are quite a few applications online that use this as an alternative name for Dunaújváros. Some of them clearly give credit (trans. put the blame) where it is due:
“Information displayed on this website is primarily based on content provided by the U.S. Geological Survey and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.”
Hi,
that is nothing. This guys iphone shows placenames from the 11th sentury – http://sten.tamkivi.com/2008/05/appleyahoos_flashback_from_11t.html
Peet,
The problem is due to the same source data, that from the U.S. Geological Survey and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (http://geonames.nga.mil/ ). “Toponymic information is based on the Geographic Names Data Base, containing official standard names approved by the United States Board on Geographic Names and maintained by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency”. This leads to this in their databases and anyone else who uses their data:
Dunaújváros (BGN Standard)
Stalinvaros (Variant)
Sztálinváros (Variant)
Dunapentele (Variant)
Hungary Fejér
46° 59′ 00″ N
018° 56′ 00″ E
46.983333
18.933333
And for Tartu it’s:
Tartu (BGN Standard)
Tērbata (Variant)
Tartto (Variant)
Yur’yev (Variant)
Yurev (Variant)
Dorpat (Variant)
Derpt (Variant)
Estonia Tartumaa
58° 21′ 58″ N
026° 44′ 10″ E
58.366111
26.736111
The variation of Dunapentele for Dunaújváros/Sztálinváros is due to the town reverting to that historic name during the 1956 revolution, in the period from 1951-1961 when it was called Stálinváros to mirror Stálingrad.
At least Aquincum doesn’t show up for Óbuda.