Tourism, conflict and contested heritage in former Yugoslavia

Naef, Patrick; Ploner, Josef

Abstract

Although, historically, there have always been travellers crossing the Balkan Peninsula, Todorova (1994 Todorova, M. (1994). The Balkans: From discovery to invention. Slavic Review, 53, 453–482. doi: 10.2307/2501301) notes that early travellers were usually heading for important centres such as Constantinople or Jerusalem, and considered South-East Europe as a peripheral place where people were just passing through. The region is only really discovered in the eighteenth century along with an increasing interest in the East. More organised forms of tourism appear at the beginning of the nineteenth century, emerging first around railway lines and thermal therapy resources, and then expanding towards the coastlines. A large part of these developments took place in Croatia and the ‘Dalmatian Riviera’, but other regions also experienced the arrival of visitors and the first organised trip in Bosnia was proposed by Thomas Cook & Sons in 1898. It is only after the Second World War, during the rule of Marshall Tito, that tourism really flourished particularly in the period between the 1960s and the 1980s, when the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) followed an alternative way of development as the rest of the Eastern Bloc. A relative openness to the West allowed the arrival of European tourists and led to forms of mass tourism in some parts of the region (Grandits & Taylor, 2010 Grandits, H., & Taylor, K. (Eds.). (2010). Yugoslavia’s sunny side: A history of tourism and socialism (1950s–1980s). Budapest: CEU Press.). While communist regimes such as Bulgaria and Romania mainly hosted eastern ‘apparatchiks’ on the Black Sea resorts, Yugoslavia and Greece focused on attracting seaside tourists from Western Europe (Cattaruzza & Sintès, 2012 Cattaruzza, A., & Sintès, P. (2012). Atlas géopolitique des Balkans. Un autre visage de l'Europe. Paris: Autrement.).

Citation

Naef, P., & Ploner, J. (2016). Tourism, conflict and contested heritage in former Yugoslavia. Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 14(3), 181-188. https://doi.org/10.1080/14766825.2016.1180802

• Journal Article Type: Editorial
• Acceptance Date: May 5, 2016
• Online Publication Date: May 5, 2016
• Publication Date: Jul 2, 2016
• Deposit Date: Feb 27, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 27, 2017
• Journal: Journal of tourism and cultural change
• Print ISSN: 1476-6825
• Electronic ISSN: 1747-7654
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 14
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 181-188
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14766825.2016.1180802
• Keywords: Tourism; Leisure and Hospitality Management; Geography, Planning and Development; Cultural Studies; Nature and Landscape Conservation; Transportation
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/448923
• Publisher URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14766825.2016.1180802
• Related Public URLs: https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:83698
• Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of tourism and cultural change on 05/05/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14766825.2016.1180802