With the radical political change in 1979, Iran’s revolutionary state assumed the responsibility of re-rewriting the past history to forge a new sense of belonging, a particularly collective religious (Shia) identity. It launched a complex process of forgetting and remembering to first eliminate the ethnic (Persian), non-religious memories and heritage, associated and celebrated by the previous regime, and then establish a sense of continuity with the country’s Shia past; a feeling markedly engendered with a distinguishing symbolic reservoir of Shia traditions and memories, presented in history books, literature, the media, and everyday culture. In this paper, I seek to analyze the political use of commemorative street names, reflecting on the ideological redefinition of modern Iranian identity. I compare changes in Tehran’s street names and analyze the widespread renaming of streets and public spaces in the city as one means of both ‘de-commemorating’ the pre-revolutionary regime and marking the Shia legacy and memories, as the signifiers of a widespread political maneuver to articulate a new version of the past and narrative of identity since the 1979 revolution. The new names commemorating a) revolutionary personalities and religious heroes, b) religiously significant events and ‘turning points’, c) sanctified sites, and d) religious ideals and principles and are assigned to forge a religious meaning for Iranian identity. Though seemingly mundane and ostensibly present, symbolic and commemorative street names, I argue, are politically charged and constitute an integral part of the ongoing state-sponsored construction of national identity. Street names marking significant turning points in the history of a nation, its political leaders, historical heroes, and mythical legends, as well as the admired ancestral lands, represent the preferred narratives of collective past and identity symbolically. As a case study, in this paper, I give particular attention to the renaming of Shayad Square and Tower, constructed in the previous regime to mark the 2,500th year of the foundation of the Imperial State in Iran, as the manifestation of the revolutionary regime’s effort to construct a new collective identity. In short, I argue that Tehran’s street names can be ‘read’ as a mirror of the state project seeking to ‘correct’ the long-lasting conflict over the meaning of Iranian identity and its ‘remembered’ collective memory.