Preliminary Programme

The most general aim of this paper is to consider the phenomenon of difficult heritage in the context of tourist spaces. Along whole Central and Eastern Europe has been emerging recently an interesting trend to exploit the communist past of the region as a tourist attraction. This presentation will focus on the ways of exhibiting communist monuments basing on the example of Sofia, Budapest and Druskininkai (Lithuania). I would like to compare how the exhibitions are organized in order to consider processes of negotiating the past in the countries with different historical and cultural backgrounds. (Show less)

This paper examines the subjective experience of sites of historical atrocity and loss for tourists engaged in the intentional act of remembrance. Much of the literature on ‘dark’ tourism and historical sites focuses on the role of off-site markers, tour guides, and widely circulating imaginaries as resources tourists use to make sense of, and find meaning in, destinations associated with trauma and death. In this paper, I expand analysis of meaning to encompass the effects of encounters with local people during in the journey, using the case of ‘Jewish Iberia’. For a great many travelers in search of Jewish heritage in Iberia—a region whose history is marked by devastating expulsions, forced conversions, and the infamously brutal Inquisition—all that can be found are traces and memories: empty synagogues, museums with limited quantities of material culture, neighborhoods with little indication that they were once Jewish quarters. In light of a growing movement to reclaim Jewish ancestral identity, however, in both Portugal and Spain tourists increasingly have an opportunity to meet with (Catholic-born) descendants of the persecuted Jews of five centuries ago. Based on long-term fieldwork in Portugal, including traveling with both package tour groups and independent tourists, I map ways that encounters with these self-identified descendants fundamentally transforms the emotional and cognitive experience of the ‘dark’ tourism destination. (Show less)

The paper focuses on the ways of retelling the past of regions which were multicultural for ages and nowadays bear traces of previous coexistence of different ethnic groups, nations and religions. Heritage tourism promoters encourage efforts to elaborate, save and share storytellings about history and give voice to those who have been excluded and silent for a long time. It enables reinterpretation of the unremembered past, what means also the challenge of understanding and explaining the ambiguity of heritage. Tourists experiences are mediated through reconstructions of historical sites and organising events or exhibitions which recreate rituals of everyday life and in/tangible heritage of old communities: national, ethnic and religious minorities which representatives do no longer live there. Back-to-the-roots travels have thus as a goal regaining the memory, renewing forgotten meanings of space and places, shrines and monuments, necropolis and landscapes. However, the desire of revitalization, in a sense, of a mythical homeland, encounters resistance, which is expressed through the signs and meanings of contemporariness, of the inhabitants' culture and identity, of their own memories and imaginaries, fears and hopes. Regardless of official tourist discourses, travellers themselves actively participate in shaping their expectations and practices, become co-mediators of experiences of place and co-authors of the stories in which they reveal complexity of the past and (re)negotiate its meaning. On the example of two sites, I will show how these processes occur in the realities of the borderland regions in south-eastern Poland. (Show less)

Officially opened in 1940, during the right-wing dictatorship of António Salazar, Portugal dos Pequenitos (Portugal of the Little Ones) is a theme park located in Coimbra (central Portugal). In it, the whole of Portugal’s colonial empire is represented through miniature replicas of regional houses of both its mainland and overseas provinces, as well as miniature replicas of the nation’s main historical monuments.
In 1975 Portugal’s colonial rule ended and new nation-states emerged from the colonial territories. The park’s connection with the right-wing regime’s propaganda has resulted in an extensive body of work on Portugal dos Pequenitos’ past. However, this presentation aims to critically analyze its present, given the park’s status as ‘the most visited tourist attraction in Coimbra’, a relevant fact since the latter is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and thus with numerous tourist attraction points.
The question to be addressed is: how does a space of a colonial nature continue to attract visitors in a postcolonial era?
Departing from an understanding of space as ‘place’ and as ‘landscape’ and based on information collected with the park’s director and staff as well as through an ethnography of the park’s visitors, this presentation will try to delineate the novel ways in which a colonial space still resonates so strongly with its visitors. The possible role of nostalgic remembrance in the visitor’s experience and the ways in which the park participates in commodified circuits of collective selves, part of globalized fluxes and imaginations (Portuguese citizens; post-tourists; Portuguese diaspora), will also be addressed. (Show less)