Tourism, conflict and contested heritage in former Yugoslavia

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.)

Environmental Heritage and the Ruins of the Future

We now have good reason to worry that many coastal cities will be flooded by the end of the century. How should we confront this possibility (or inevitability)? What attitudes should we adopt to impending inundation of such magnitude? In the case of place-loss due to anthropogenic climate change, I argue that there may ultimately be something fitting about letting go, both thinking prospectively, when the likelihood of preservation is bleak, and retrospectively, when we reflect on our inability to prevent destruction. I then explore some of the ethical complications of this response

Contested townscapes: the walled city as world heritage

This is the author's post print version of an article accepted for publication in World Archaeology. © 2008 Informa plc. The definitive publisher-authenticated version (Vol.39 (3), September 2007 pp.339-354) is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00438240701464822. 18 month embargo by the publisher. Article will be released March 2009.Walled towns and cities feature prominently on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. But, while a fundamental guiding principle of the WHS list is that properties are designated for the benefit of all, these historic walled communities can be conceptualized as a particularly 'dissonant' form of heritage where the past is contested or disputed in the present. Many such places have violent histories and have changed political or national allegiance in the past. Moreover, city walls, while outwardly embracing populations, also inevitably serve to exclude or marginalize other social groups. The identities of walled heritage cities are multi-layered and far from static, being susceptible to re-invention. Tensions and contradictions are also apparent in the fact that heritage agencies work in national contexts on the management of sites that are designated as an international resource, and the agendas of these organizations can mean that certain periods or interpretations of the past are prioritized above others. All these factors present considerable challenges to those responsible for conserving and researching heritage sites that are simultaneously living communities. Against this background, the practicalities and politics of designating and delineating historic walled communities as World Heritage Sites are reviewed, as are strategies for managing the archaeological resource. The paper draws on examples of walled communities inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, with a particular emphasis on Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Key sites include Acre (Israel), vila (Spain), Carcassonne (France), Conwy (United Kingdom), Dubrovnik (Croatia) and Jerusalem

Culture in Heritage On the Socio-Anthropological Notion of Culture in Current Heritage Discourses

The intellectual ‘heritage’ of social anthropology - universalism, cultural relativism and comparative method - is today strongly used as a tool-box by institutions and scholars from other fields. An anthropologically colored concept of culture is employed in UNESCO’s international legal frameworks, in the epistemological foundation and justification of the new academic subject heritage as well as for wider contextualizations of case studies on specific heritage items. While all of these discourses involve a marked universalistic notion of culture, the contribution of our paper is to show the different roles that the anthropological subject, culture, plays in each one of them. (Past; History; Sociology of time; Cultural Heritage; UNESCO

Faculty concert: "Dreams, Delirium and Transcendence In the Music of our Time," January 30, 1998

This is the concert program of the Faculty Concert: "Dreams, Delirium and Transcendence In the Music of our Time" performance on Friday, January 30, 1998 at 8:00 p.m., at the Tsai Performanc Center, 685 Commonwealth Avenue. Works performed were Phantasy for Violin and Piano, Op. 47 by Arnold Schoenberg, Sonata No. 3 for Violin and Piano by Charles Ives, Viola Zombie by Michael Daugherty, and Sonata No. 2 "Quasi una Sonata" by Alfred Schnittke. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Contested identities: the dissonant heritage of European town walls and walled towns

This is the author's post-print version of an article accepted for publication in International Journal of Heritage Studies. © 2008 Informa plc. The definitive publisher-authenticated version (Vol.12 (3), May 2006, pp.234-254) is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527250600604498Town walls have always played a critical role in shaping the identities and images of the communities they embrace. Today, the surviving fabric of urban defences is a feature of heritage holding great potential as a cultural resource but in management terms one that poses substantial challenges, both practical and philosophical. Town walls can be conceptualised as a 'dissonant' form of heritage whose value is contested between different interest groups and whose meanings are not static but can be rewritten. Evidence is gathered from walled towns across Europe, including member towns of the WTFC (Walled Towns Friendship Circle) and inscribed UNESCO World Heritage Sites, to explore the cyclical biographies of town walls in their transformation from civic monuments, through phases of neglect, decay and destruction to their current status as cherished cultural resources. To explore this area of interface between archaeology and tourism studies, the varying attitudes of populations and heritage agencies to walled heritage are reviewed through examination of policies of conservation, preservation, presentation and restoration. Areas of commonality and contrast are thus identified

Dark Cities: A dark tourism index for Europe’s tourism cities, based on the analysis of DMO websites

Purpose: Dark tourism is a topic of increasing interest, but it is poorly understood when considering its significance for mainstream and commercial tourism. This paper investigates the significance of dark tourism in the top ten most visited European tourist cities and proposes a dark tourism index for Europe’s tourism cities. Methodology: Data was collected from the websites of the cities’ Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) using a content analysis methodology, based on keywords related to dark tourism taken from the research literature in this area. Descriptive statistics were produced and the variance between the frequencies of keywords related to each city was analysed for statistical significance. These results were then used to construct a darkness ranking of the cities. Findings: There are significant differences in the extent to which dark tourism products and services are promoted by the DMOs of Europe’s top ten most visited European cities. The ranking of cities by darkness does not correspond to the ranking by visitor numbers, and further qualitative analysis suggests that that the ranking is also independent of the actual presence of dark sites within the destination. This implies that European city DMOs are engaging with the emerging dark tourism market with to varying degrees. Research Limitations: The purposive sample of ten cities can be extended in future research to increase the validity of the findings of this paper. A further limitation is the selection of keywords for content analysis, which have been developed following the literature review contained below. Future research could develop an extended list of keywords using a systematic review process. Research Value: This paper shows that it is possible to create a ranking of tourist cities in terms of their darkness, and that this methodology could be extended to a much larger sample size. This links dark tourism research to the urban tourism literature and also offers possibilities for creating a global ranking that could be used by destinations to judge their success in engaging with the dark tourism market, as well as by tour operators seeking to develop products for the same market