Three alumni from the Department of Classical & Archaeological Studies, have had their research, entitled ‘Dark Heritage Tourism and the Sarajevo Siege’, published in the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, published by Taylor and Francis.
The research of Marija Kamber, Theofanis Karafotias and Theodora Tsitoura, alumni from the Heritage Management MA based in Athens, is the first post war assessment on how Bosnia treats the heritage of war in its tourist industry and was funded with assistance from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
Sarajevo bears a rich and diverse cultural past, which includes the three distinct periods of the Ottoman occupation (1463-1878), the Austro-Hungarian rule (1878-1914) and the Yugoslav Federation (1945-89). But the darkest chapter in its long history was about to be written just after Bosnia and Herzegovina was recognized as an independent country in 1992, when the latest war of 1992-95 unfolded. One of the most distinctive episodes of that war was the siege of Sarajevo. Apart from the open wounds, the Sarajevo siege left behind a painful heritage too. The paper answers some of the crucial questions related to the management of the 1992-95 war sites in Sarajevo. It investigates tourists’ motives and expectations for visiting these sites as well as identifying crucial issues in managing ‘dark tourism/heritage’ sites. Moreover, the paper provides an analysis that could be a powerful tool for the different stakeholders to design activities and promote and manage effectively the war-related sites in Sarajevo, depending on the needs and opinion of their public.
Full details of the publication can be found at: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14766825.2016.1169346