Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change The past as staged-real environment: communism revisited in The Crazy Guides Communism Tours, Krakow, Poland (original) (raw)
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Historical-themed guided tours are a basic format of the touristic storytelling industry. By understanding them as spatially bound rituals of collective gazing in which images of the past are drawn collaboratively by the guide and the tourists, this article argues that guided tours provide a lens through which to examine the making of history. Focusing on commercial communism tours in Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava, the article shows that the promise to bodily experience the communist past via immersion enables ludic performances that can both strengthen and unsettle historical images. As a paradoxical result, communism tours evoke both nostalgia for a simple, easily understandable world and a negative image of an unwanted, difficult past.
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This article is a contribution to the developing body of research on tourism within the region of the Central and Eastern Europe. Our aim is to explore if and how Polish tourists to the former Soviet Union incorporate a historic past in their imaginaries. Sixty interviews carried out between 2008 and 2012 are analyzed in order to establish if there are references to the past in tourist accounts despite the fact history was not a major travel motivation. We were also interested in how the past co-creates tourist experiences and destination images. We found out that tourists may question dominant versions of historic memory in their straightforward references to the past. We also discovered that sources of memory are multiple and include not only first-hand memory but also family memory as well as non-representational memory. Some tourists purposefully suppressed the past. We suggest that more attention should be paid to 'traces' of the past in tourism imaginaries. There are relatively few studies on tourism within the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (for exceptions see: Gorsuch & Koenker, 2006; Sowiński, 2005). Our aim is to cover this gap and demonstrate that the region is internally differentiated. We are particularly interested in the internal differences, tensions, hierarchies and clashes of memories in tourism imaginaries in the region (cf. Verschaeve & Wadle, 2014). This article focuses on the case of Polish tourists travelling to the countries of the former Soviet Union). If one compares a map of most visited routes by Polish tourists to the countries of the former Soviet Union with a map of the Polish diaspora in the same region, the pattern of mobility and settlement is strikingly similar (cf. Walaszek, 2001). At the same time, most tourists we interviewed did not have history at the top of their list of travel motivations. In the proposed paper we would like to address questions about a place of history in Polish tourists' imaginaries. How does the historic past becomes a blueprint for tourists' routes? What images of history Polish tourists have? How the past is remembered and what are the sources of memory in tourism imaginaries? Are there blind spots in the vision of the past, and do the past render itself to
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