Balkan Dissonant Heritage Narratives (and Their Attractiveness) for Tourism

Abstract

The paper deals with the question of scientific and practical treatment of dissonant cultural heritage in the Balkan region and the way in which this heritage can be used for the development of tourism in the region. Cultural heritage is often seen as an important factor in explaining the post-socialist landscape of the Balkans. In terms of symbolic geography, the Balkans has been and still remains inserted in the long standing binary oppositions East - West, Europe - Asia, Christianity - Islam, Centre - Periphery, etc. These are in variations present also in travel writing through the dominant negative label of Western travel accounts. In investigating the historical heritage of the Balkans and its dissonant narratives, we put focus on those that left the deepest imprint on the region's multilayered identity: the Byzantine, the Ottoman and the communist / socialist. The main question put in this research is: How “dissonant heritage” of the Balkans together with its stigmatized image and identity can be interpreted for tourism? This research is done from an interdisciplinary interpretative approach, using a combination of methods such as narrative and discourse analyses. The research shows that Balkan discourse provides a full range of dissonant heritage narratives that can be used in creating tourism routes and narratives and it suggests the possibilities in order to overcome problems of conflicting interpretation of common cultural heritage.