dark tourism athens

Athens Dark Tourism Guide 2023 (updated for 2024)

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Table of contents

Introducing athens’ dark tourism scene, exploring the ruins and monuments of ancient greece.

• Taking in the Urban Legends of Athens' Streets

Penetrating the Mysterious Crypts of Athens

Seeking out the haunted houses in athens, notable dark tourism sites in athens, the athens war museum, overview and historical significance, notable exhibits and collections, visiting information, the kaisariani rifle range (skopeftirio), historical context, transformation into a memorial site, the 1941-1944 memorial site, the fascinating history of 4 korai street mansion, how to visit and what to expect, the athens polytechnic university, significance of the polytechnic uprising.

• Commemorative Events and the Gate's Symbolism

The Haidari Concentration Camp (Block 15)

Its history during world war ii, current status and the future as a museum, the parnitha sanatorium, origins and various uses throughout history, status as an abandoned site and visitor advice, the davelis cave, legends and history surrounding the cave, the cave as a natural and mythological point of interest, the first cemetery of athens, cemetery as a historic site and open-air museum, notable graves and examples of funerary art, sample itinerary for a dark tourist visit to athens.

 Welcome to the ultimate dark tourism guide for Athens in 2023! Whether you’re a seasoned traveler looking for something a bit out of the ordinary, or an outsider curious about an ancient culture and its hidden secrets, this guide will provide all the information you need. From exploring long-forgotten mine shafts on world-renowned archaeological sites, to uncovering historically significant events in haunted cathedrals, get ready to explore some unforgettable experiences around Athens with our user-friendly google maps feature. Travelers can use this interactive map as they navigate their way through history while discovering exciting national monuments and iconic cultural hubs around town. Be warned though: there are arrows along the route that point towards places best left undiscovered due to their potentially spooky vibes so be sure not to click past them too quickly!

Welcome to Athens, a city rich in history and culture. While most visitors come to explore the ancient temples and marvel at the stunning architecture, there is another side to Athens that has been gaining popularity among tourists – its dark tourism scene. From the time of the Ottoman Empire to Greece's more recent economic crisis, Athens has experienced its fair share of dark and tragic events. And for those interested in exploring the city's haunting past, there are plenty of options to choose from. Take a tour of the infamous prison, where political dissidents were tortured during the military dictatorship or visit the site of a devastating terrorist attack that shook the city in 2003. While Athens' dark tourism scene may not be for everyone, it does offer a unique opportunity to explore the city's troubled, yet fascinating history.

Embark on a journey back in time to the ancient Greek civilization and explore the ruins and monuments that still stand tall today. From the iconic Parthenon in Athens to the impressive Temple of Zeus in Olympia, the architecture alone is awe-inspiring. But these structures are not just aesthetically pleasing - they are windows to the past, offering insight into the daily lives, myths, and beliefs of the ancient Greeks. Imagine walking along ancient roads, marveling at the intricate details of sculptures that have stood for millennia, and soaking in the rich history of this remarkable civilization. A visit to these ancient ruins and monuments is a must for any history buff or travel enthusiast.

Taking in the Urban Legends of Athens' Streets

As you wander the streets of Athens, you may begin to hear whispers of the city's urban legends. From the infamous "Melo-Katsourbos," a mischievous jester who reportedly haunts the streets of Monastiraki, to the eerie tales of the abandoned Psychiko Children's Hospital, there's no shortage of chilling stories to send shivers down your spine. But these legends aren't all frights and horrors. Some, like the story of the Beggar's Opera, offer a glimpse into the city's rich cultural history. So next time you're strolling through Athens, keep your ears open and see what stories you can uncover. Who knows what secrets and mysteries lurk just around the corner?

Welcome to Athens, a city steeped in mystery and history. As you wander through the bustling streets, it's hard not to feel in awe of the ancient wonders surrounding you. But if you're a true adventurer at heart, then you must venture underground to the mysterious crypts of Athens. Once used to house the remains of the dead, these crypts now hold centuries of secrets waiting to be discovered. Imagine walking through narrow passageways, surrounded by cold stone walls and dimly lit torches, feeling the weight of history bearing down on you. With every step, you'll uncover new clues to the past, from ancient hieroglyphics to hidden treasures. So grab your flashlight, and let's journey into the heart of Athens' intriguing past!

Athens, the historic capital of Greece, is a city rich in ancient myths and legends. If you're seeking an adrenaline rush and spine-tingling adventure, Athens is home to a plethora of haunted houses that are sure to give you goosebumps. From the eerie and abandoned mansion on Kifissia Avenue to the notorious Tower of the Winds, said to be home to the powerful wind daemon Boreas, there is an abundance of spooky spots to explore. Brave souls seeking something truly out of the ordinary can even visit the abandoned underground catacombs beneath the city, where ghosts of ancient Greeks are said to roam. So, book your tickets, pack your bags, and get ready to embark on an unforgettable ghost-hunting adventure in Athens.

Nestled in the heart of the city, the Athens War Museum stands as a sentinel to Greece's storied past. Established in 1975, its architectural grandeur hints at the treasures within, encapsulating the valor and sacrifice of Greek soldiers. The museum holds paramount significance in illustrating the city's role as a battleground in various conflicts.

The museum boasts a staggering collection of over 20,000 artifacts, each telling its own tale of heroism and hardship. Visitors encounter everything from antiquated weaponry from the Greco-Persian Wars to contemporary military technology. Notable exhibits include an Avro Anson plane, used during the Nazi occupation, and a fascinating array of uniforms worn by Greek soldiers throughout history.

Opening its gates from Monday to Sunday, the museum invites you to traverse through time from 09:00 to 17:00. Reaching the site is convenient, with several public transport links available. Admission costs start from 6 euros for adults, making it a must-see destination for any history enthusiast visiting Athens.

A mere whisper among locals not long ago, the Kaisariani Rifle Range has emerged as a monument to courage and resistance. It was here, in the grim days of May 1944, that the Nazi Occupation Forces executed 200 Greek partisans, etching a somber chapter in Athens' history.

Today, the rifle range is a testimony to the indomitable spirit of Greek resistance. Local authorities have meticulously transformed the once-forbidding grounds into a tranquil memorial site. Visitors can pay their respects at this hallowed ground and reflect upon the sacrifices made for freedom.

The story of the 4 Korai Street Mansion is one of resilience and remembrance. A mundane building took on a cloak of darkness during the WWII occupation, sheltering the Kommandantur—infamous for its role in detention and governance under Axis control. In the subterranean cells, countless tales of defiance and survival were etched into the walls by the imprisoned, a solemn yet powerful record.

Immersive and memorable, a visit here is a reverent experience. The remnants of wartime detention facilities offer a chilling reminder of those tumultuous times. Given the restored nature of the space, visitors walk in the shoes of the prisoners, experiencing the stark reality that no history book can fully convey.

The Athens Polytechnic Uprising of 1973 epitomizes the struggle for democracy and truth. When an autocratic junta stifled civil liberties, the resounding call for freedom echoed through the university's halls, a call that was met with fatal force.

Commemorative Events and the Gate's Symbolism

Today, the Polytechnic still hosts events to commemorate the uprising, keeping its memory alive. The charred remains of the university gate, breached by a tank in a fateful clash between the youth and the junta, remain untouched. It stands as a permanent testament to the power of protest and the perils that come with it.

A hushed visitation amidst the tranquil suburb of Haidari reveals the stark contrast of war's horrors. Block 15, a part of the Haidari Concentration Camp, saw the detention and torture of Greek citizens by the Nazi regime. Today, it serves as a vital archival and research center dedicated to preserving the memory of those who endured the camps' injustices.

Efforts are underway to transform this site into a museum, ensuring that the lessons from history remain relevant in contemporary discourse. By shedding light on the excesses of totalitarian regimes, visitors will gain a profound understanding of the perils of prejudice and aggression.

Nestled upon Mount Parnitha's verdant slopes, the Parnitha Sanatorium once offered a sanctuary for tuberculosis patients. Converted into an emergency hospital during World War II, it witnessed the struggles of the wounded, serving as a canvas for tales of perseverance and hope.

The site now lies abandoned, a haunting reminder of the past. As such, it provides a unique opportunity for contemplation. Visitors are advised to approach the sanatorium with respect for its history. The dilapidated structures and eerie silence serve as a poignant backdrop for reflections on the passage of time and the endurance of the human spirit.

The Davelis Cave, steeped in myth and historical intrigue, is a natural formation that has been the subject of many a tale. Home to a variety of fascinatingly eerie formations, the cave's depths conceal secrets that invite intrepid explorers to unravel the mysteries within.

It serves as a natural and mythological point of interest in the region. The cave's geological features, including spectacular stalactites and stalagmites, offer a sensory adventure through time. As you venture deeper, the cave's resonance with history and myth becomes palpable, making for an enthralling experience.

The First Cemetery of Athens exists not only as a resting place for the departed but also as an open-air museum. The grandeur of its ornate tombs and the illustrious figures interred within its hallowed grounds provide a unique reflection on the city's cultural and political history.

Notable figures from the annals of Greek history find their final repose here. The cemetery's diverse array of sculptures and funerary art styles is a tapestry of artistic expression. A stroll through these avenues is akin to a guided tour through the milestones of Greek society, revealing narratives often untold.

Athens is a city steeped in history, and for dark tourists, there are many compelling destinations that explore the darker side of this ancient city. Start your day by visiting the eerie Kokkinia execution site, where over 200 prisoners were executed during the Greek Civil War. Next, head to the controversial Museum of Anti-Dictatorial and Revolutionary Art, which houses a collection of artifacts from Greece's turbulent history. In the afternoon, explore the Athens War Museum, which boasts a vast collection of military memorabilia, including tanks and fighter jets. End the day with a trip to the ancient Kerameikos Cemetery, the final resting place for notable Athenians of the past. As a dark tourist, Athens offers a unique perspective to those seeking an unconventional travel experience.

Athens is the perfect destination for any dark tourist looking to experience an abundance of mystery, creepy vibes and a mystery deep-rooted in history. Visitors can explore ancient ruins, uncover old legends, enter crypts and buildings with secrets locked deep inside. Even the local cuisine has added flavor derived from centuries-old folk recipes. If you are looking to embark on a journey through time, then be sure to make Athens your next stop where you can reconnect with the city's darkness of the past. So make sure to check out our sample itinerary if you're brave enough to take on a daring dark tour in Athens!

Last updated on February 25th, 2024 at 08:38 am

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EXPERIENCES

A chilling journey of ‘dark tourism’ around greece.

Unearthing sites suffused with history's melancholy tones, certain to ignite intrigue among visitors

BY GIANNIS KOUTROUDIS

Translated by sophia velopoulos, published 02 june 2023, the sanctuary of the great gods on samothrace/photo: shutterstock.

We will navigate the labyrinth of “dark tourism.” A curious phenomenon has taken root in recent years – travellers are increasingly drawn towards narratives etched in shadow rather than the typical sun-soaked experiences. Thus, the rise of “dark tourism”, a global movement transforming travel into an exploration of humanity’s grim past. Morose? Possibly. Controversial? Certainly. But undeniably, dark tourism plays a pivotal role in preserving our historical memory, breathing life into narratives long obscured by time’s relentless march.

In this spirit, we present a selection of Greece’s most notorious dark tourism destinations, offering a distinct travel experience for those desiring a taste of the unconventional.

Spinalonga, Crete

Consider Spinalonga, Crete, an island of barely 100 square metres . Yet its history looms large, a colossal monument to human suffering. In 1903 , this abandoned Venetian fortress morphed into a leper colony , a place of exile for those afflicted with this incurable disease.

Dark, isn’t it? But there’s more. The notoriety of Spinalonga grew so profound that patients across Europe found themselves bound for this tiny enclave. With no cure for leprosy available, Spinalonga became a one-way journey, a farewell to freedom, to life itself.

Spinalonga/Photo: Unsplash

Despite these grim realities, Spinalonga didn’t surrender to despair. It blossomed into a vibrant community, connected to Plaka by the ceaseless rhythm of the sea. Its residents, during the German Occupation , launched a unique rebellion, leveraging the occupiers’ inherent fear to secure free ally radios . A daring defiance of authority in a place where normalcy had long ceased to exist.

Photo: Unsplash

Spinalonga/Photo: Kanella Klimatsida/Eurokinissi

With the advent of effective antibiotics , Spinalonga’s story started drawing to a close. This once bustling island slowly deflated, only to be reclaimed by silence. Yet, in a twist of fate, this once-doomed rock has become one of Crete’s most frequented dark tourism hotspots. Its tragic history now casting a hauntingly beautiful glow.

Photo: Shutterstock

Sanctuary of the Great Gods/Photo: Panagiotis Savvidis

Replica of the Winged Victory of Samothrace/Photo: Panagiotis Savvidis

Sanctuary of the great gods, samothrace.

Venture into the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace. Though now a serene archaeological site, it’s among the most enigmatic monuments in Greece. The site is entangled with the Kabeirian Mysteries, ancient rites venerating chthonic deities unfamiliar in mainland Greece.

At this sanctuary, Zeus , Hera , and Aphrodite were overlooked. Instead, aristocrats and slaves alike participated in secretive ceremonies, offering cryptic sacrifices to honour deities that remain, to this day, elusive to researchers.

Current findings suggest the Kabeirian Mysteries originated from ancient Anatolian religions, which found their way to Samothrace for reasons obscured by time. Legend has it, the site’s aura was so powerful that any uninitiated individual who dared to enter would invite grave misfortune, some said they would be cursed for life. Pay a visit to Samothrace and attempt to untangle this ancient enigma. Perhaps you’ll be the one to decode its mysteries.

Δείτε αυτή τη δημοσίευση στο Instagram. Η δημοσίευση κοινοποιήθηκε από το χρήστη John Xenos (@giannhs_xenos)

War Museum of Leros

Among the murkier recesses of the Leros tunnel, one can glimpse relics of a bleaker past: Fascist Italy’s symbology, Nazi Germany’s anti-asphyxiation suits, helmets peppered with bullet holes, and even submarine torpedoes, all displayed with a certain morose pride.

Δείτε αυτή τη δημοσίευση στο Instagram. Η δημοσίευση κοινοποιήθηκε από το χρήστη Іван Олександрович Каберне (@ivankaberne)

This tunnel bore witness to the Battle of Leros, where Fascist Italy’s forces bit, scratched, and clawed to retain one of their last territories in the Eastern Mediterranean. A visit, is guaranteed to send shivers down your spine. You’ll be handed a shot-sized, yet potent taste of the horrors from humanity’s darkest war in recent history.

Dragon Houses of Southern Euboea/Photo: Shutterstock

Dragon Houses of Southern Euboea/Evia

Next, let’s explore the enigmatic Dragon Houses of Southern Euboea. Only 25 of these enigmatic structures exist, and their purpose remains a riddle. Were they homes, places for exiles, or temples? We’re not certain. Constructed in the early Hellenistic period, these Dragon Houses are monolithic stone structures set at dominating locations.

These edifices, made of enormous grey stones, were presumably built by individuals with Herculean strength. With no definitive findings in the area, it’s almost as if these houses sprang from the earth. Surely, a tale that’d set your ‘dark intrigue’ alarm ringing.

So, if you’re eager to uncover the secrets of the Dragon Houses, all you need is a comfortable pair of shoes and an appetite for mystery. And remember, if you manage to solve this enigma, do share your revelation. We’d all love to delve deeper into the true purpose of these mysterious structures.

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‘Red lights are flashing’: Athens tourism explosion threatens ancient sites

Visitor numbers to hit 30m – three times nation’s population – as experts grapple to balance economic gains with conservation

H ordes of tourists huddle in groups along the cobbled boulevard beneath the Acropolis on a late November morning more summery than autumnal. Others get on and off the open-top doubledeckers running the riviera route. A man dressed as an ancient Marathon warrior poses “for a fee” with the majestic citadel in the background.

“We’re having a great year,” says the Greek tourism minister, Vassilis Kikilias. “It’s almost December and the season is still going which is exactly what we want – to extend it, bit by bit.”

Tourism in Athens – as Greece at large – has defied all expectation. The sector, the country’s economic engine, was budgeted to bring in €15bn this year and appeared doomed when bookings froze in February at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Instead, earnings are more likely to exceed €18bn with visitor numbers poised to come close to 30 million – nearly three times the nation’s population – despite the war, absence of Chinese visitors and the unwanted appearance of jellyfish, says Kikilias.

At the height of the summer, about 16,000 holidaymakers each day were making the arduous climb up to the Acropolis. In the alleyways of Plaka, the neighbourhood beneath the ancient site, shopkeepers say they have never had it so good. “If anything, we just want them to go home now,” says Anna Simou, who works in a contemporary Greek design store in the district. “We’re all exhausted and that’s with management employing new staff.”

But the post-pandemic bounceback is not without risks. Kikilias is the first to say that the thriving industry needs to be spread more evenly beyond the “two and a half regions” drawing the crowds. Sustainability is also on the mind of Kostas Bakoyannis, the mayor of Athens, who last week called for a city tax to be placed on visitors to help cope with the surge in demand on services. In a departure from a time when the Greek capital was viewed invariably as a transit route to the islands, more than 7 million tourists are estimated to have descended on the metropolis in 2022.

“It’s unfair that 650,000 permanent residents in the heart of ancient Athens should foot the bill,” Bakoyannis says. “If we want to sustain the city we need to adapt in the way that almost every other European capital has, and introduce a city tax on visitors.”

Americans arriving on 63 direct flights a week have been key to making Greece the world’s third most popular tourist destination this year, according to industry figures. But as officials tally the success of a sector that accounts for 25% of GDP, the spectre of overtourism – long evident on islands such as Santorini – has spurred concerns over the dangers soaring numbers pose for the conservation of cultural gems.

As home to 18 Unesco world heritage sites, Greece is increasingly highlighting the challenges of managing visitor numbers, with experts emphasising the fine balance that needs to be struck between protecting ancient monuments and developing them for touristic use. The 495–429BC Acropolis, which is among the designated sites, was itself at the centre of controversy when in 2020 the government installed concrete pathways around the Periclean masterpiece and an unsightly glass and steel lift financed by private donors to improve access.

“Reds lights are flashing,” says Peter DeBrine, Unesco’s leading tourism adviser.“We have to start asking how much is too much and 16,000 visitors clogging a monument like the Acropolis every day sounds like way too much.”

DeBrine said studies had shown that, more than ever, travellers wanted sustainable options.

With tourism roaring back in both Europe and the US, it was imperative, he said, that capacity measures were adopted at popular heritage sites.

“We have gone from overtourism to revenge tourism with the same net effect,” he told the Guardian, describing the latter as a pent-up response to the pandemic. “What is needed is a radically different approach which starts with consumers but extends to tourism and heritage management. It’s clear that authorities have to take measures to relieve overcrowding at world heritage sites if the tourism experience isn’t to be degraded and conservation ensured.”

Unesco’s 50th anniversary convention in Delphi debated the impacts of the climate crisis and overtourism. It has urged members to change marketing tactics by focusing on attracting fewer, high-spending and lower-impact tourists, rather than large groups.

“Our hope is that tickets will soon only be sold online because that would be a sure way of limiting access,” says DeBrine, adding that adjustment of ticket prices according to season could also be enforced with entrance fees costing more at the height of summer. “Choosing to travel during the low or shoulder season makes a huge impact.”

Heritage sites in east Asia recently began implementing a new Unesco visitor management and strategy tool to identify a baseline for sustainable tourism.

“It’s given us a snapshot,” explained DeBrine. “We realise tourism is the lifeblood for so many communities and vital to local economies but overtourism is a real danger. Either you’re clever and you take measures or you kill the goose that lay the golden egg.”

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The Ultimate Athens Dark Tourism Guide (Updated 2024)

When we think of Athens, our minds race to images of ancient ruins, golden beaches, and traditional tavernas. But there's a darker, more enigmatic side to this ancient city - a side that even I, as a local, was unaware of for most of my life. This is the world of dark tourism and, in Athens, it has a deep story to tell.  This guide is a local's effort to gather all the most important dark tourism spots in Athens, Greece. It is updated for 2023 and, as new spots are discovered, it will be updated.

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Tourism’s dark side: Are those who love Greece killing it?

Average Greek property prices increased by 12 percent last year and are set to increase by another 14 percent this year, according to Bank of Greece data.

Athens, Greece – Shortly after the conservative New Democracy party came to power in Greece in 2019, computer scientist Nikos Larisis left his job in the Netherlands and repatriated to the Mediterranean country for a salary worth a third of the 9,000 euros ($9,500) he was making per month.

He appeared to vindicate New Democracy’s pledge to bring back about half a million educated young workers who had fled the country’s economic depression from 2010 to 2018.

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The conservatives returned to power for a second term in June with little evidence that many Greeks had followed in Larisis’s footsteps.

Even he and his fiancee, Eleftheria Tsiartsiani, a public elementary schoolteacher, had been feeling stuck and were considering going abroad.

They were paying a quarter of their joint income in rent and could not borrow enough money to buy the two-bedroom home in which they dreamed of starting their family.

Then the government announced a 1.8-billion-euro ($1.9bn) programme to help young couples buy their first home.

“Eleftheria told me, ‘Niko, we can buy a home. We can reconsider. We needn’t pick up stakes and leave,'” Larisis told Al Jazeera.

But after looking into the government’s offer, called My Home, the couple became disillusioned.

“It wasn’t designed well at all. It led people on and destroyed their dreams,” Larisis said.

Larisis and Tsiartsiani could borrow 90,000 euros ($96,000) under the programme, but that did not secure an attractive family home in a market geared towards foreign buyers spending 250,000 euros ($270,000) for a Golden Visa, which at the time offered them five years of legal residence and a path to citizenship. The spending requirement for the Golden Visa has since changed to double that amount.

“I’m going to let the state keep its 90,000 euros,” Tsiartsiani said. “There’s no point in buying a small, old apartment, dark and dank, that doesn’t fit our needs, smelling of mould in an unkempt building and being in debt up to my neck for the rest of my life.”

Moreover, Tsiartsiani said: “We saw a lot of sales ads that stipulated, ‘The property isn’t for sale through the My Home programme.'”

Sellers told the couple they did not believe they would get their money from the government and wanted cash only.

The experience convinced the couple that Greek law was tilted in favour of non-Greeks.

My Home did not allow beneficiaries to rent out their property and restricted them to buying a property close to work. The Golden Visa programme has no such limitations.

“There’s a big party going on. Foreign capital is trying to take advantage of the situation here, and the laws are helping them. Golden Visas allow people to come and buy homes here … while others are struggling with loans they can’t repay,” Larisis said.

The sting in tourism’s tail

Greece’s big economic success under New Democracy has been tourism, which has boomed since the COVID-19 pandemic, attracting three times Greece’s population each year. It brought in a near-record 18 billion euros ($19bn) in revenue last year.

Tourism helps bring in the foreign currency with which Greece services its loans, and it has helped existing homeowners. About 105,000 properties are now offered on short-term rentals through Airbnb.

But it has also worsened a demographic problem. By restoring real estate value lost during the depression, it has put first homes out of the reach of young people.

“We emerged from the pandemic with a bit of extra cash, … which was mainly concentrated on housing,” said real estate consultant Stelios Bouras, who runs the Greek Guru real estate news website. “Working at home, people wanted larger houses. … This coincided also with a massive increase in Greek homes going to foreign buyers.”

Average Greek property prices increased by 12 percent last year, and are set to increase by another 14 percent this year, according to Bank of Greece data.

That has spurred investment in real estate, but almost all of it is geared towards the top end of the market.

The Ellinikon is a prime example – a 600-hectare (1,500-acre) urban redevelopment of what used to be the Athens airport, nestled among the city’s southern suburbs.

Its first project, Marina Tower, now rising along the Attica shore, will be Greece’s tallest building when it is finished.

It will also be one of the most expensive. Every floor has been sold at a reputed 16,000 euros ($17,000) per square metre (nearly 11sq ft).

The Ellinikon’s owners said real estate will average 10,000 euros ($10,600) per square metre, but that is still well above the capabilities of most Greeks.

“The growth in the market which everyone is citing right now in terms of investment is for your high net worth individual from abroad and your top income level in Greece,” Bouras told Al Jazeera.

“For the vast majority, there is zero development. And if you look at government policy to increase supply levels, there is almost no movement,” he added.

The Ellinikon’s CEO makes no apology for the fact that 30 percent of the 1.2 billion euros ($1.27bn) of real estate he has already sold has gone to Syrians, Egyptians, Emiratis, other Europeans and Americans.

Odysseas Athanasiou argued that by attracting foreign buyers, The Ellinikon opens up Greece’s stagnant economy.

“For many, many decades, Greece was redistributing the pie of wealth, or poverty, if you will, and now with the new income that is coming from all places in the world, we are bringing in new money. The new money will be distributed more or less to everybody,” Athanasiou told Al Jazeera.

Among other benefits, Athanasiou says, The Ellinikon will create 80,000 permanent jobs.

Shrinking, ageing population

Greek society faces a potentially existential problem, and property prices are making it worse.

Its population has been shrinking since the turn of the century. That shrinkage accelerated after its eurozone partners imposed austerity policies on it in return for emergency loans in 2010.

Greece’s birth rate fell by 30 percent from 2011 to 2021 to under 84,000 per year, slipping ever-further below the death rate, according to the Hellenic Statistical Service.

The cumulative population loss during that decade was 329,451, which roughly tallies with the 2021 census recording a 3.1 percent population drop.

Given that each Greek paid on average 5,758 euros ($6,125) in taxes and social security contributions last year, this drop represents a loss of nearly 2 billion euros ($2.13bn) a year in state revenue – about 3.2 percent – over the long term.

Analysts said that by mid-century, Greece could find it difficult to generate the current level of state revenue – 60 billion euros last year ($64bn) – or man its armed forces.

The population drop is especially damaging in combination with ageing. Only 4.2 million Greeks work, supporting a total population of 10.5 million, including three million pensioners.

New Democracy has begun Greece’s first capitalised social security scheme for the under 25s, but for now, the majority of pensioners relies on current contributions.

New Democracy has also launched a series of measures to tackle the population decline and may have had a measure of success.

It delivered on promises to reduce the income tax, sales tax and social security contributions and offered paternity leave and extended daycare.

It offered a 2,000-euro ($2,200) cash handout per child, raised the tax rebate for families by 1,000 euros ($1,065) and now promises to drive up average salaries from 1,170 to 1,500 euros ($1,245 to $1,600).

Signs of improvement

Greece may have begun to see a faint heartbeat of improvement. Live births increased by 1.2 percent in 2020 and by 0.7 percent in 2021.

But My Home, its biggest direct measure to help young couples move ahead with their lives, has met with mixed results.

The programme was meant to accommodate 137,000 young people, but only 4,500 applications have received state approval and not all of them have gone on to receive bank approval.

“All programmes undergo evaluation and correction,” Maria Syrregela, deputy labour minister under the previous government told Al Jazeera. “My Home was the start of an ongoing state programme to provide housing.”

Syrregela was in charge of demographic policy, and perhaps her biggest achievement was that she got the opposition to sign onto a multiyear plan of action.

“Demographic policy isn’t about doing something today and having tangible results tomorrow,” she said.

“If you start a programme now, you might see results in 10 years. That’s why governments tended not to bother.”

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Beaches? Cruises? ‘Dark’ Tourists Prefer the Gloomy and Macabre

Travelers who use their off time to visit places like the Chernobyl nuclear plant or current conflict zones say they no longer want a sanitized version of a troubled world.

By Maria Cramer

North Korea. East Timor. Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave that for decades has been a tinderbox for ethnic conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

They’re not your typical top tourist destinations.

But don’t tell that to Erik Faarlund, the editor of a photography website from Norway, who has visited all three. His next “dream” trip is to tour San Fernando in the Philippines around Easter , when people volunteer to be nailed to a cross to commemorate the suffering of Jesus Christ, a practice discouraged by the Catholic Church.

Mr. Faarlund, whose wife prefers sunning on Mediterranean beaches, said he often travels alone.

“She wonders why on earth I want to go to these places, and I wonder why on earth she goes to the places she goes to,” he said.

Mr. Faarlund, 52, has visited places that fall under a category of travel known as dark tourism , an all-encompassing term that boils down to visiting places associated with death, tragedy and the macabre.

As travel opens up, most people are using their vacation time for the typical goals: to escape reality, relax and recharge. Not so dark tourists, who use their vacation time to plunge deeper into the bleak, even violent corners of the world.

They say going to abandoned nuclear plants or countries where genocides took place is a way to understand the harsh realities of current political turmoil, climate calamities, war and the growing threat of authoritarianism.

“When the whole world is on fire and flooded and no one can afford their energy bills, lying on a beach at a five-star resort feels embarrassing,” said Jodie Joyce, who handles contracts for a genome sequencing company in England and has visited Chernobyl and North Korea .

Mr. Faarlund, who does not see his travels as dark tourism, said he wants to visit places “that function totally differently from the way things are run at home.”

Whatever their motivations, Mr. Faarlund and Ms. Joyce are hardly alone.

Eighty-two percent of American travelers said they have visited at least one dark tourism destination in their lifetime, according to a study published in September by Passport-photo.online, which surveyed more than 900 people. More than half of those surveyed said they preferred visiting “active” or former war zones. About 30 percent said that once the war in Ukraine ends, they wanted to visit the Azovstal steel plant, where Ukrainian soldiers resisted Russian forces for months .

The growing popularity of dark tourism suggests more and more people are resisting vacations that promise escapism, choosing instead to witness firsthand the sites of suffering they have only read about, said Gareth Johnson, a founder of Young Pioneer Tours , which organized trips for Ms. Joyce and Mr. Faarlund.

Tourists, he said, are tired of “getting a sanitized version of the world.”

A pastime that goes back to Gladiator Days

The term “dark tourism” was coined in 1996, by two academics from Scotland, J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, who wrote “Dark Tourism: The Attraction to Death and Disaster.”

But people have used their leisure time to witness horror for hundreds of years, said Craig Wight, associate professor of tourism management at Edinburgh Napier University.

“It goes back to the gladiator battles” of ancient Rome, he said. “People coming to watch public hangings. You had tourists sitting comfortably in carriages watching the Battle of Waterloo.”

Professor Wight said the modern dark tourist usually goes to a site defined by tragedy to make a connection to the place, a feeling that is difficult to achieve by just reading about it.

By that definition, anyone can be a dark tourist. A tourist who takes a weekend trip to New York City may visit Ground Zero. Visitors to Boston may drive north to Salem to learn more about the persecution of people accused of witchcraft in the 17th century. Travelers to Germany or Poland might visit a concentration camp. They might have any number of motivations, from honoring victims of genocide to getting a better understanding of history. But in general, a dark tourist is someone who makes a habit of seeking out places that are either tragic, morbid or even dangerous, whether the destinations are local or as far away as Chernobyl.

In recent years, as tour operators have sprung up worldwide promising deep dives into places known for recent tragedy, media attention has followed and so have questions about the intentions of visitors, said Dorina-Maria Buda, a professor of tourism studies at Nottingham Trent University .

Stories of people gawking at neighborhoods in New Orleans destroyed by Hurricane Katrina or posing for selfies at Dachau led to disgust and outrage .

Were people driven to visit these sites out of a “sense of voyeurism or is it a sense of sharing in the pain and showing support?” Professor Buda said.

Most dark tourists are not voyeurs who pose for photos at Auschwitz, said Sian Staudinger, who runs the Austria-based Dark Tourist Trips , which organizes itineraries in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe and instructs travelers to follow rules like “NO SELFIES!”

“Dark tourists in general ask meaningful questions,” Ms. Staudinger said. “They don’t talk too loud. They don’t laugh. They’re not taking photos at a concentration camp.”

‘Ethically murky territory’

David Farrier , a journalist from New Zealand, spent a year documenting travels to places like Aokigahara , the so-called suicide forest in Japan, the luxury prison Pablo Escobar built for himself in Colombia and McKamey Manor in Tennessee, a notorious haunted house tour where people sign up to be buried alive, submerged in cold water until they feel like they will drown and beaten.

The journey was turned into a show, “Dark Tourist,” that streamed on Netflix in 2018 and was derided by some critics as ghoulish and “sordid.”

Mr. Farrier, 39, said he often questioned the moral implications of his trips.

“It’s very ethically murky territory,” Mr. Farrier said.

But it felt worthwhile to “roll the cameras” on places and rituals that most people want to know about but will never experience, he said.

Visiting places where terrible events unfolded was humbling and helped him confront his fear of death.

He said he felt privileged to have visited most of the places he saw, except McKamey Manor.

“That was deranged,” Mr. Farrier said.

Professor Buda said dark tourists she has interviewed have described feelings of shock and fear at seeing armed soldiers on streets of countries where there is ongoing conflict or that are run by dictatorships.

“When you’re part of a society that is by and large stable and you’ve gotten into an established routine, travel to these places leads you to sort of feel alive,” she said.

But that travel can present real danger.

In 2015, Otto Warmbier , a 21-year-old student from Ohio who traveled with Young Pioneer Tours, was arrested in North Korea after he was accused of stealing a poster off a hotel wall. He was detained for 17 months and was comatose when he was released. He died in 2017, six days after he was brought back to the United States.

The North Korean government said Mr. Warmbier died of botulism but his family said his brain was damaged after he was tortured.

Americans can no longer travel to North Korea unless their passports are validated by the State Department.

A chance to reflect

Even ghost tours — the lighter side of dark tourism — can present dilemmas for tour operators, said Andrea Janes, the owner and founder of Boroughs of the Dead: Macabre New York City Walking Tours.

In 2021, she and her staff questioned whether to restart tours so soon after the pandemic in a city where refrigerated trucks serving as makeshift morgues sat in a marine terminal for months.

They reopened and were surprised when tours booked up fast. People were particularly eager to hear the ghost stories of Roosevelt Island, the site of a shuttered 19th-century hospital where smallpox patients were treated .

“We should have seen as historians that people would want to talk about death in a time of plague,” Ms. Janes said.

Kathy Biehl, who lives in Jefferson Township, N.J., and has gone on a dozen ghost tours with Ms. Janes’s company, recalled taking the tour “Ghosts of the Titanic” along the Hudson River. It was around 2017, when headlines were dominated by President Trump’s tough stance on refugees and immigrants coming into the United States.

Those stories seemed to dovetail with the 100-year-old tales of immigrants trying to make it to New York on a doomed ship, Ms. Biehl said.

It led to “a catharsis” for many on the tour, she said. “People were on the verge of tears over immigration.”

Part of the appeal of dark tourism is its ability to help people process what is happening “as the world gets darker and gloomier,” said Jeffrey S. Podoshen , a professor of marketing at Franklin and Marshall College, who specializes in dark tourism.

“People are trying to understand dark things, trying to understand things like the realities of death, dying and violence,” he said. “They look at this type of tourism as a way to prepare themselves.”

Mr. Faarlund, the photo editor, recalled one trip with his wife and twin sons: a private tour of Cambodia that included a visit to the Killing Fields , where between 1975 and 1979 more than 2 million Cambodians were killed or died of starvation and disease under the Khmer Rouge regime.

His boys, then 14, listened intently to unsparing and brutal stories of the torture center run by the Khmer Rouge. At one point, the boys had to go outside, where they sat quietly for a long time.

“They needed a break,” Mr. Faarlund said. “It was quite mature of them.”

Afterward, they met two of the survivors of the Khmer Rouge, fragile men in their 80s and 90s. The teenagers asked if they could hug them and the men obliged, Mr. Faarlund said.

It was a moving trip that also included visits to temples, among them Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, and meals of frog, oysters and squid at a roadside restaurant.

“They loved it,” Mr. Faarlund said of his family.

Still, he can’t see them coming with him to see people re-enact the crucifixion in the Philippines.

“I don’t think they want to go with me on that one,” Mr. Faarlund said.

52 Places for a Changed World

The 2022 list highlights places around the globe where travelers can be part of the solution.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram , Twitter and Facebook . And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places for a Changed World for 2022.

Maria Cramer is a reporter on the Travel desk. Please send her tips, questions and complaints about traveling, especially on cruises. More about Maria Cramer

Open Up Your World

Considering a trip, or just some armchair traveling here are some ideas..

52 Places:  Why do we travel? For food, culture, adventure, natural beauty? Our 2024 list has all those elements, and more .

Mumbai:  Spend 36 hours in this fast-changing Indian city  by exploring ancient caves, catching a concert in a former textile mill and feasting on mangoes.

Kyoto:  The Japanese city’s dry gardens offer spots for quiet contemplation  in an increasingly overtouristed destination.

Iceland:  The country markets itself as a destination to see the northern lights. But they can be elusive, as one writer recently found .

Texas:  Canoeing the Rio Grande near Big Bend National Park can be magical. But as the river dries, it’s getting harder to find where a boat will actually float .

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Dark tourism: when tragedy meets tourism

The likes of Auschwitz, Ground Zero and Chernobyl are seeing increasing numbers of visitors, sparking the term 'dark tourism'. But is it voyeuristic or educational?

Days after 71 people died in a London tower block fire last June, something strange started to happen in the streets around it. Posters, hastily drawn by members of the grieving community of Grenfell Tower, appeared on fences and lamp posts in view of the building's blackened husk.

'Grenfell: A Tragedy Not A Tourist Attraction,' one read, adding — sarcastically — a hashtag and the word 'selfies'. As families still searched for missing inhabitants of the 24-storey block, and the political shock waves were being felt through the capital, people had started to arrive in North Kensington to take photos. Some were posing in selfie mode.

"It's not the Eiffel Tower," one resident told the BBC after the posters attracted the attention of the press. "You don't take a picture." Weeks later, local people were dismayed when a coachload of Chinese tourists pulled up nearby so that its occupants could get out and take photos.

Grenfell Tower, which still dominates the surrounding skyline (it's due to be demolished in late 2018), had become a site for 'dark tourism', a loose label for any sort of tourism that involves visiting places that owe their notoriety to death, disaster, an atrocity or what can also loosely be termed 'difficult heritage'.

It's a phenomenon that's on the rise as established sites such as Auschwitz and the September 11 museum in Manhattan enjoy record visitor numbers. Meanwhile, demand is rising among those more intrepid dark tourists who want to venture to the fallout zones of Chernobyl and Fukushima, as well as North Korea and Rwanda. In Sulawesi, Indonesia, Western tourists wielding GoPros pay to watch elaborate funeral ceremonies in the Toraja region, swapping notes afterwards on TripAdvisor.

Along the increasingly crowded dark-tourist trail, academics, tour operators and the residents of many destinations are asking searching questions about the ethics of modern tourism in an age of the selfie and the Instagram hashtag. When Pompeii, a dark tourist site long before the phrase existed, found itself on the Grand Tour of young European nobility in the 18th century, dozens of visitors scratched their names into its excavated walls. Now we leave our mark in different ways, but where should we draw the boundaries?

Questions like these have become the life's work of Dr Philip Stone , perhaps the world's leading academic expert on dark tourism. He has a background in business and marketing, and once managed a holiday camp in Scotland. But a fascination with societal attitudes to mortality led to a PhD in thanatology, the study of death, and a focus on tourism.

"I'm not even a person who enjoys going to these places," Stone says from the University of Central Lancashire, where he runs the Institute for Dark Tourism Research. "But what I am interested in is the way people face their own mortality by looking at other deaths of significance. Because we've become quite divorced from death yet we have this kind of packaging up of mortality in the visit economy which combines business, sociology, psychology under the banner of dark tourism. It's really fascinating to shine a light on that."

Historical roots

The term 'dark tourism' is far newer than the practice, which long predates Pompeii's emergence as a morbid attraction. Stone considers the Roman Colosseum to be one of the first dark tourist sites, where people travelled long distances to watch death as sport. Later, until the late 18th century, the appeal was starker still in central London, where people paid money to sit in grandstands to watch mass executions. Hawkers would sell pies at the site, which was roughly where Marble Arch   stands today.

It was only in 1996 that 'dark tourism' entered the scholarly lexicon when two academics in Glasgow applied it while looking at sites associated with the assassination of JFK. Those who study dark tourism identify plenty of reasons for the growing phenomenon, including raised awareness of it as an identifiable thing. Access to sites has also improved with the advent of cheap air travel. It's hard to imagine that the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum would now welcome more than two million visitors a year (an average of almost 5,500 a day, more than two-thirds of whom travel to the Polish site from other countries in Europe) were it not for its proximity to Krakow's international airport.

Peter Hohenhaus, a widely travelled dark tourist based in Vienna, also points to the broader rise in off-the-beaten track tourism, beyond the territory of popular guidebooks and TripAdvisor rankings. "A lot of people don't want mainstream tourism and that often means engaging with places that have a more recent history than, say, a Roman ruin," he says. "You go to Sarajevo and most people remember the war being in the news so it feels closer to one's own biography."

Hohenhaus is also a fan of 'beauty in decay', the contemporary cultural movement in which urban ruins have become subject matter for expensive coffee-table books and a thousand Instagram accounts. The crossover with death is clear. "I've always been drawn to derelict things," the 54-year-old says. As a child in Hamburg, he would wonder at the destruction of war still visible around the city's harbour.

That childhood interest has developed into an obsession; Hohenhaus has visited 650 dark tourist sites in 90 countries, logging them all and more besides on his website . He has plans to put together the first dark tourism guidebook. His favourite holiday destination today is Chernobyl and its 'photogenic' ghost town. "You get to time travel back into the Soviet era but also into an apocalyptic future," he says. He also enjoys being emotionally challenged by these places. "I went to Treblinka in 2008 and heard the story of a teacher at an orphanage in Warsaw who was offered a chance to escape but refused and went with his children to the gas chambers. Stories like that are not everyday, you mull over them. Would you have done that?"

But while, like any tourism, dark tourism at its best is thought-provoking and educational, the example of Grenfell Tower hints at the unease felt at some sites about what can look like macabre voyeurism. "I remember the Lonely Planet Bluelist book had a chapter about dark tourism a while ago and one of the rules was 'don't go back too early'," Hohenhaus says. "But that's easier said than calculated. You have to be very aware of reactions and be discreet when you're not in a place with an entrance fee and a booklet." Hohenhaus said he had already thought about Grenfell Tower and admits he would be interested to see it up close. "It's big, it's dramatic, it's black and it's a story you've followed in the news," he says. "I can see the attraction. But I would not stand in the street taking a selfie."

A mirror to mortality

An urge to see and feel a place that has been reduced to disaster shorthand by months of media coverage is perhaps understandable, but Stone is most interested in the draw — conscious or otherwise — of destinations that hold up a mirror to our own mortality. "When we touch the memory of people who've gone what we're looking at is ourselves," he says. "That could have been us in that bombing or atrocity. We make relevant our own mortality." That process looks different across cultures — and generations — and Stone says we should take this into account before despairing of selfie takers at Grenfell Tower or Auschwitz.

"I've heard residents at Grenfell welcoming visitors because it keeps the disaster in the public realm, but they didn't like people taking photos because it's a visual reminder that you're a tourist and therefore somehow defunct of morality," he explains. "We're starting to look at selfies now. Are they selfish?" Stone argues that the language of social media means we no longer say "I was here", but "I am here — see me". He adds: "We live in a secular society where morality guidelines are increasingly blurred. It's easy for us to say that's right or wrong, but for many people it's not as simple as that."

"Travel itself is innately voyeuristic," argues Simon Cockerel, the general manager of Koryo Tours , a North Korea specialist based in Beijing. Cockerel, who has lived in China for 17 years and joined Koryo in 2002, says demand has grown dramatically for trips to Pyongyang and beyond, from 200 people a year in the mid 1990s, when the company started, to more than 5,000 more recently. He has visited the country more than 165 times and says some clients join his tours simply to bag another country, and some for bragging rights. But the majority have a genuine interest in discovering a country — and a people — beyond the headlines.

"I've found everyone who goes there to be sensitive and aware of the issues," he says. "The restrictions do create a framework for it to be a bit like a theme park visit but we work hard to blur those boundaries. More than 25 million people live in North Korea, and 24.99 million of them have nothing to do with what we read in the news and deserve to be seen as people not as zoo animals or lazy caricatures."

More challenging recently has been the US ban on its citizens going to North Korea, imposed last summer after the mysterious death of Otto Warmbier. The American student had been arrested in Pyongyang after being accused of trying to steal a propaganda poster. Americans made up about 20% of Koryo's business, but Cockerel argues the greater loss is to mutual perception in the countries. "The North Korean government represent Americans as literal wolves with sharpened nails," he says. "At least a few hundred Americans going there was a kind of bridgehead against that. Now that's gone."

At Grenfell Tower, responsible tourism may yet serve to keep alive the memory of the disaster, just as it does, after a dignified moratorium, at Auschwitz and the former Ground Zero. Hohenhaus says he will resist the urge to go until some sort of memorial is placed at the site of the tower. At around the time of a commemorative service at St Paul's Cathedral six months after the fire, there were calls for the site eventually to be turned into a memorial garden. The extent to which Hohenhaus and other dark tourists are welcomed will be decided by the people still living there.

Five of the world's dark tourism sites

1. North Korea Opened to visitors in the late 1980s, North Korea now attracts thousands of tourists each year for a peek behind the headlines.

2. Auschwitz-Birkenau The former Nazi death camp became a memorial in 1947 and a museum in 1955. It's grown since and in 2016 attracted a record two million visitors.

3. 9/11 Memorial and Museum Built in the crater left by the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the museum, opened in 2014, has won plaudits for its portrayal of a disaster and its impact.

4. Rwanda Visitor numbers to genocide memorials have grown in Cambodia and Bosnia as well as in Rwanda, where there are several sites dedicated to the 1994 massacre of up to a million people. The skulls of victims are displayed.

5. Chernobyl & Pripyat, Ukraine Several tour companies exist to send visitors to the exclusion zone and ghost town left otherwise empty after the nuclear accident in 1986. All are scanned for radiation as they leave.

Published in the March 2018 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK)

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Boston, Massachusetts, USA, April 2-6, 2019

Approaching “Dark Heritage” Through Essential Questions: An Interactive Digital Storytelling Museum Experience

Akrivi Katifori , National Kapodistrian University of Athens & ATHENA Research Center, Greece, Klaoudia Marsella Restrepo Lopez , National Kapodistrian University of Athens., Greece, Dimitra Petousi , National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, Manos Karvounis , University of Athens, Greece, Vassilis Kourtis , National and Kapodistrian University of Athens | ATHENA Research Center, Greece, Maria Roussou , National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, Yannis Ioannidis , Univ. of Athens & ATHENA Research Center, Greece

Keywords: interactive digital storytelling, dark heritage, visitor study, essential questions

Introduction

The potential of digital storytelling in cultural heritage has been widely recognized as an effective technique for communicating heritage interpretation to the public and increasing the understanding of the past and its implications for the present (Staiff, 2014). Digital storytelling seems to offer the capability to reach a wider, more engaged and returning audience (Brittain and Clack 2007).

In previous research, initiatives like the EU funded projects CHESS ( http://www.chessexperience.eu/ ) (Katifori et al, 2014) and EMOTIVE ( https://www.emotiveproject.eu/ ) (Katifori et al, 2019), we have explored the potential of mobile digital storytelling and identified guidelines and best practices for the design and authoring of digital storytelling experiences at a heritage site (Roussou et al 2018, Perry et al 2017, Katifori et al., 2018).

In this paper, we apply this work for the design of a digital storytelling experience in the Criminology Museum of the University of Athens. The collections of the museum fall under the definition of “dark heritage,” as defined in the next section of the paper, featuring a variety of crime-scene evidence, including weapons and even human remains.

Part of the literature around dark tourism and heritage seems to emphasize a fascination with death as the main (and even sole) motive for visiting sites in which death is presented (Stone & Sharpley, 2008). The more morbid aspects of the Criminology Museum would at first glance seem to be ideal for a storytelling-based approach that would ensure visitors’ emotional engagement and fascination. However, a closer study of the museum history, current practice and objectives, as well as a comprehensive visitor study revealed that a difference approach would be better suited for this particular site.

In this work, we report on how we created a thought-provoking digital storytelling experience for the museum. Following a user-centered design methodology, we discerned that the motivation of the museum audience was not only to have an encounter with crime and death, but also to better understand and reflect upon the darker sides of human nature. Then, borrowing from education, we used the notion of “essential questions” as tools to stimulate thought, to provoke inquiry, and lead to a deeper understanding of how the world and human nature work (Jacobs, 1997) with the objective to develop an interactive digital storytelling experience for the museum.

In the following section, we refer to the the concept of “dark heritage” and then present the Criminology Museum as a dark-heritage site, followed by the findings of the visitor study we performed in the museum. Next, we focus on the concept of “essential questions” and their application in heritage, before going into the details on how we applied it in our digital storytelling experience. We conclude the work with our insight on guidelines for sites with similar characteristics as well as addressing open issues and challenges for the application of digital storytelling in dark heritage contexts.

Current Practice in Dark Heritage

Dark tourism (also referred to “black tourism” or “grief tourism”) has been defined as tourism involving travel to places historically associated with death and tragedy (Foley & Lennon, 1996)—some of them managed as entertainment venues and others with more focus on a historical- and heritage-related approach. The term “dark heritage” has been applied to both sites and artifacts, along with terms like “difficult heritage” and “dissonant heritage.” More specifically, dark cultural heritage can be defined as “cultural heritage that is associated with real and commodified sites of atrocity, death, disaster, human depravity, tragedy, human suffering, and sites of barbarism and genocide”(Kuznik, 2018).

Although dark heritage is relatively new as a term, the concept coincides with possibly one of the oldest types of tourism, as there is an innate human inquisitiveness and touristic attraction to places of death and horror (including popular public events of the past, such as public hangings, beheadings, the burning of witches, gladiatorial games, etc. (Kuznik, 2018).

There is a clear and identified tendency in the heritage sector to capitalize on the “product of dark tourism” and in a sense “milk the macabre,” (Dann, 1994) taking advantage of its willing consumption by the “dark tourist.” As suggested by Stone (2005), “within contemporary society, people regularly consume death and suffering in touristic form, seemingly in the guise of education and/or entertainment,” and sometimes tact and taste do not “prevail over economic considerations.” However, without the tourist demand, there would be no need to supply it.

A large part of dark tourism and heritage literature seems to emphasize this fascination with death as the main (and even sole) motive for visiting sites in which death is presented (Stone & Sharpley, 2008). This perspective is sometimes adopted in virtual storytelling experiences for dark heritage sites, and the ethical aspects of such approaches have been discussed in Fisher & Schoemann (2018). However, according to Biran et al., (2011) motives vary and include a desire to learn and understand the history presented and an interest in having an emotional heritage experience. (Rami and Erdinç, 2013).

In the end, the motivation behind exhibiting these sites is what partially dictates whether they are exploitative or not. In the next section, we attempt to clarify where the Criminology Museum stands in this respect.

The Athens University Criminology Museum as a Dark Heritage Site

The Athens University Criminology Museum ( http://www.criminology-museum.uoa.gr/ ) was founded in 1932, and since 1992, it has been housed within the Laboratory of Forensics and Toxicology of the Athens University Faculty of Medicine. Its collections are related to toxicology, criminology, forensic medicine, and weapons and present the history of crime in Greece in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is probably one of the most peculiar and special museums in Athens, more akin to the “curiosity rooms” of the 16th century, interestingly—not housed inside an amusement park but rather in the heart of an academic institution.

The museum is not open to the public daily and, until recently, operated only by appointment for special interest groups, such as students and specific organizations with an interest in arms or crime and forensics, gradually the wider public to visit. The museum opens one day per year to the public. The great number of visitors on this open day makes it evident that digital access to the museum collections should be made available to cater to this demand, to meet the needs of the audience while fulfilling the museum’s purpose of communicating heritage (Koutsis, 2019).

Visiting the museum can definitely be classified as a “dark heritage” experience. The collections cover different aspects of crime; however, death is a prominent and shocking theme. The human remains collection contains mummified heads of 19th-century bandits, remains preserved in glass jars and even a full-body mummy, whereas the wax models of the effects on the human body of different methods of murder, like gunshots to the head and actual crime-scene photos, add a strong emotional effect.

Figure 1: Wax body-part models, visualizing a physical attack

All of these strange exhibits are displayed without any intent to shock or capitalize on the macabre. They are naturally displayed as objects that have served their scientific or investigatory purpose and are now in waiting to be used again by young scientists and investigators in the context of their education—much like what one would expect of an evidence storage room in older times. This impression is consistent and confirmed by the history of the museum.

Figure 2: The ear and hand of A. Schinas, who murdered Georgios Α’, King of Greece

The founder and person responsible for the core of the collections was a professor of Forensic Medicine, Ioannis Georgiades (1874 – 1960). Georgiades was a gun enthusiast, avid collector of crime scene evidence and Olympic Fencing  medallist in the 1886 Athens games as well as a dedicated researcher and philanthropist. It may seem strange that one person can combine such seemingly conflicting qualities. It is a given that studies of human nature, acting for good and evil, have been performed through Philosophy and Metaphysics. However, as science and technology are now able to provide a better understanding of these intriguing questions, experts in Forensics and Criminology are now called to give new answers about how accidents or crimes happen, identifying the reasons and sometimes the motives for the crime. This is why behind the exhibits, there is a hidden story—one that the first-time visitor can feel but not immediately realize, and that is the scientific research work of the Laboratory of Forensics and Toxicology.

Figure 3: General view of the museum gallery

The peculiar circumstances in which the evidence was produced and the specific context of the object acquisitions may easily explain the highly engaging quality of the permanent exhibition. However, this quality remains like a “dormant advantage” as there is a strong awareness among the Board members (who also serve as guides when tours are programmed) that shocking material is not to be blatantly exposed to the general public. The overall result is the emphasis on academic presentation, leaving the human stories behind the exhibits silent, mostly due to the limited time of the guided tours and to a shortage of personnel.

The above scientific approach, consistent with the founder’s vision, seems to be a conscious direction for the museum, ensuring a clear decision for fostering historical understanding and institutional education, without directly responding to the present fascination for the macabre.

Understanding the Museum Audience

As the Criminology Museum is accessible to the public only by appointment, the best way to study the type of audiences the museum would attract, if open, was to conduct a visitor study during the university museums’ Open Day event. This event takes place once a year. Only then, everybody is given the chance to visit all the Athens University museums, even those regularly closed to the public. They may choose to participate in guided tours or attend special events.

The visitor study was conducted on Saturday, October 7, 2017, 11:00am—3:00pm. During this time, the museum received 300 visitors who accessed the museum in groups of 30-45 and participated in a guided tour by one member of the museum staff. Of those, 137 were briefly interviewed at the end of their visit. In parallel, members of our team observed the visitors throughout the tour and tracked preferences in regard to visitor trajectories and time spent in the museum gallery after the end of the guided tour. For the needs of this work, we focus on the results of the study, which are relevant to the visit characteristics and the visitors’ preferences and needs.

Based on the evaluation team’s informal observations, most of the visitors lingered on even after the end of the guided tour to view the collections themselves, focusing on the ones that caught their attention most. In this sense, the mean-visit duration was closer to 45 minutes to 1 hour, significantly more than the expected 20—30 minutes of the guided tour. During the visit, the guided-tour participants seemed focused on the guide, and they were not discouraged, even by the ample use of scientific terminology by the experts. They listened to the interpretative information with interest, and then in their own time, they followed their personal paths of discovery of the exhibits.

This positive view of the museum is confirmed by the interviews as 86% confirmed that their expectations were met, and about 20% were very enthusiastic and commented on the “uniqueness” of the museum. 47% reported that they liked “all the collections.” 41% liked the guided tour, and 27% liked the forensic medicine collection, with special mentions to the embryos, the mummy, the human remains and the bandits’ mummified heads. There were also references to other exhibits like the guillotine, the firearms, the letters of the mentally ill, material related to the occult, the toxicology exhibits, etc.

A low 12% of the visitors reported that they were “partly satisfied” by the visit, whereas only three visitors said they were not satisfied at all. As to the reasons they were not satisfied by the visit, the majority (31%) reported the “small space.” 8.7% felt the time allocated to them for the visit was too little. 30% referred to issues related to the museological design and presentation of the collections, including the lack of more detailed information on specific exhibits and the fact the museum is not open to the public daily. Only a very small percentage referred to the shocking nature of some of the exhibits, like the embryos.

It is interesting that 66% of the visitors reported that they would recommend the museum to the wider public, without any restrictions. 38% felt that it is also appealed to special interest groups, as it could serve educational purposes as well as an inspiration for book writers. Some suggested that the museum could be accessible to high school students as “now psychology is taught in high schools by the age of 12” and “children now are familiar with harder images related to crime through television and the web.”

On the whole, the visitors expressed the wish that newer exhibits should be added to the collections and that the museum would benefit from a more modern approach in their presentation. Few reported the use of technological means as a necessity, whereas they felt that a communicative and friendly expert guide, like those met in the museum, always make the visit more pleasant. They saw the guide as a reliable source of anecdotal stories and of unique perspectives— somebody who is not a mere narrator of facts about the objects but an efficient communicator who enables discovery of the human aspects behind the real stories.

So, what makes the visitor experience so successful for almost all visitors in this museum, even though there was very limited and antiquated exhibition space and minimal interpretative material available? Was it the dark and shocking nature of the exhibits that made this difference? The visitor study revealed the opposite. Although some of the visitors were, in fact, drawn to the museum because it was “different,” its darker nature was not what made visitor engagement much longer than the allocated time. What seemed, in fact, to do the trick was the interaction with the criminal science experts and their “insider” scientific information, as well as the human stories they brought to life: stories of crime, yes, but more importantly, stories that revealed different aspects of human nature and provoked a deeper type of reflection.

An interesting find that reinforces the success of the guided tour as it is approached so far by the museum is that a very small percentage of the visitors, less than 1%, felt the need for the presence of “technological means,” for example, an audio guide. What they did appreciate was the “friendly staff,” the “scientific information,” and “impressing stories,” leading to a fuller “understanding of human nature.”

However, even though a digital app was not explicitly requested by the visitors, it was requested by the staff, who felt that they are not able to cover this strong demand for guided tours in the museum, due to their other research and investigatory duties in the Laboratory of Forensics and Toxicology.

It is a fact that a digital app cannot replace the expert, but can it be designed in such a way that it stays true to the guided tour’s more successful qualities? The next section presents “essential questions” as a design tool to this end.

“Essential Questions” as a Tool to Design for Heritage

The traditional assumption when designing museum exhibitions and informational content for cultural sites is that the visitor comes to the site with an appetite for information. Cultural institutions attempt to satisfy this appetite through traditional informational labels and audio guides or even more elaborate, multimedia approaches—all designed to offer to the visitor general information.

However, a more realistic assumption would be that most visitors do not enter a site with any pre-existing knowledge of its themes and specifics, in some cases brought there as part of a group or through touristic curiosity. In many cases, they are drawn to the site as a “must-see” destination—in our case more of a “curiosity,” or even a way to spend some relaxing time when visiting a new place. Frequently, although they have an interest in the site, they do not truly and deeply understand or even care for its themes and topics. Once there, and especially when an obvious source of awe is lacking, they feel unsure as to what is there to care about and absentmindedly but diligently are going from exhibit to exhibit and from label to label, or just wandering around looking for something to attract their interest.

This section discusses “essential questions” as a proposed first step to design for the visitor’s initial engagement.

What are “Essential Questions”?

A first step toward designing for engagement can be the identification of the “interesting” and “relatable” aspects of a site. Toward this direction, we utilise the notion of “essential questions,” a technique used in education to provoke self reflection and constructive dialogue among students in a formal education, classroom setting. Essential questions are defined as “essential” in the sense of signalling genuine, important and necessarily-ongoing inquiries, “questions that are not answerable with finality in a brief sentence . . . Their aim is to stimulate thought, to provoke inquiry, and to spark more questions” (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005).

Essential questions can be characterized as:

• Relatable to personal experiences, views of the world and issues that feel relevant to people’s lives
• Open-ended, i.e., there are no right or wrong answers
• Intellectually engaging and able to spark meaningful discussion among a group of people
• Requiring high-order thinking: analysis, inference, debate

Examples of essential questions may include:

• What motives could lead a person to take up arms?
• What reasons would lead someone to take their own life?
• Should the state have the power to enforce the death penalty?
• What is the role of illegal substances in the society?
• Why do people turn to magic to solve their problems?
• What is the role of chance in our lives?
• What is the role and application of scientific research in our everyday lives and in criminal investigation in particular?

In the next section we focus on how the concept of essential questions informed the design of a digital storytelling experience for the museum.

The Criminology Museum’s Digital Storytelling Experience

The overall concept and design of a digital storytelling app for the Criminology Museum was iteratively realized by two expert museologists from our group. The concept and design were, in fact, grounded on the feedback received by the museum curators and collaborating experts (after several interviews), the visitor study and observations during the Open Day, and the detailed study of the material presented by the experts during the guided tours.

The overarching theme for the experience is the application of scientific methodology in criminal investigatory practice, and the historical aspects of this practice, grounded on more general and philosophical questions related to human nature. The experience is composed of two parts:

• A 15-minute interactive digital storytelling experience, with the title “Following the mysterious evidence,” where the user becomes a criminal investigator of the early-20th century, with the objective to introduce criminal investigatory practice before the museum tour starts and set the visitor’s mood.
• A 20-minutes to 1.5-hour narrative, under the title “The exhibits tell their stories,” in which the visitor, while looking at the museum exhibition cases, can select individual stories of specific objects and how they relate to wider questions about human nature.

“Following the Mysterious Evidence” Interactive Storytelling Experience

The interactive digital storytelling experience allows the user to experience a story and make decisions within the mobile storytelling app through the eyes of a criminal investigator from the beginning of the 20th century. A crime has been committed inside a house, and the user is called to the location to examine the crime scene and speak with witnesses, and then examine evidence with colleagues back at the police station. This is a brief, 15-minute storytelling experience, designed to introduce different types of evidence that the visitor will later encounter in the museum and describe how they are studied and used during the criminal investigation.

Figure 4: Screenshots of the interactive-crime-investigation experience

“The Exhibits Tell Their Stories” Branching Narrative

With the senses of the visitor aroused and the essential questions, about death, murder and the human state of mind starting to form, the next step in this museum experience is a branching narrative that follows a main collection grouping approach. When starting the “The exhibits tell their stories” experience, the visitor first listens to a brief introduction about the museum and its founder and then is given the opportunity to select between the different museum collections. Each collection features selected representative exhibits which are presented through different perspectives, including:

• What is the role of the exhibit in criminal science?
• Anecdotal stories about the exhibit.
• General reflections for the essential questions related to the collection and particular exhibit.

The visitors can select and listen to as many of these narratives as they wish and then move back to the main menu and select a different collection. This modular approach to the material can accommodate a visit planned to last from 20 minutes to 1.5 hours.

Technology Used

To create and deliver the aforementioned experiences, we used the Narralive software tools also employed within the EMOTIVE project (Katifori et al., 2019).

The experiences were created through the use of the Storyboard Editor, an authoring tool for interactive digital storytelling targeted to authors with minimal-to-no technical expertise. Using the convention of the storyboard, this tool enables creators to organise their content and create interactive activities using predefined templates that were designed based on previous research in digital heritage experiences (Roussou & Katifori, 2018). After creating an experience, it becomes available to the museum’s visitors through the dedicated mobile application. The Storyboard Editor is a client-side web application created with AngularJS in its core. The data produced in the tool are stored into a CouchDB database where they become available to our mobile application.

Figure 5: The Storyboard Editor, used to create the digital storytelling experiences

The mobile application created for the museum is based on the Narralive mobile application that supports the delivery of experiences created from the Storyboard Editor to the museum’s visitors. The app is designed in a way that allows us to customize it for a specific museum, as we did in this particular case. Through the use predefined templates, the mobile application is able to present static or interactive activities to the visitors, based on the author’s choices. The provided activities vary from simple pages with image and text, to quizzes, exhibit exploration, character dialogue or questions directed to the users (see figure 6). Additionally, the experience may follow different paths, if the author chooses to add branches into the narrative. Then the visitor may see menus like the ones presented in figure 7. The mobile app is available for devices based on Android v4.1 (API 16) and later. It was developed with Android Studio and utilises Android Flavors to enable easy UI customisation based on the museum’s needs.

Figure 6: A sample of the templates offered by the Narralive mobile app for the visitors

Figure 7: Examples of branching points where users have the ability to choose paths in the experience

Another tool, the Floor Plan Editor, was used to create a virtual representation of the museum on the Internet, using 360-degree pictures. This will allow us to run further evaluations of the experience with remote users, but it will also enable interested parties to explore the museum from their homes, given that it is closed to the public throughout the year. This is a web application created with AngularJS, and the created content is also stored in the aforementioned CouchDB database. The resulting virtual museum is also available through a web browser.

Figure 8: The Floor Plan Editor which was used to create a virtual representation of the museum

On-going Evaluation

The resulting digital storytelling experiences have been adapted so as to be tested and evaluated, both on-site and online. We evaluated the efficacy of these different versions to explore their potential for making the museum accessible virtually as well as promoting visitor engagement while visiting the museum, without the need of a human guide.

The app has been undergoing an iterative formative evaluation process. The feedback received through the user evaluation is taken into account to improve the structure and production of the content as well as inform other aspects of the app, like the navigational cues leading to the exhibits.

Fourteen users have tested the app so far, and the feedback on the content has been very positive. Most issues reported were more relevant to the structure of the content as well as the need for navigation cues to the exhibits, which are not so easy to locate in many cases.

An interesting observation, to be confirmed with further evaluation activities, is that some users when first entering the gallery felt restricted to focus immediately on the app and follow even its very loose guided structure of providing narrative material, per collection and object. Especially those younger in age felt eager to roam freely around the gallery, examine the strangest items, and comment and discuss with the people in their party. After this initial exploration, they felt more inclined to use the app to find out more and make more informed decisions about what they wanted to hear.

We consolidate and discuss our findings and insights from the design process of this experience in the following section.

In recent years, given that information is offered through the Web, in a fast-paced, visual and interactive way, it has become harder and harder to engage visitors with a site through traditional, non-digital and non-interactive exhibition approaches (Graham, 2018). This fact makes enhancing and promoting the macabre within a dark cultural heritage context all the more appealing as a solution to engage audiences.

In this sense, it is more and more crucial to find ways to initially engage the visitors in the context of the site, to find themes that are relatable to them and their personal experiences, to excite their curiosity. Then, once their interest is caught, they will actively seek information themselves, to answer questions that they have on the site and its historical context.

Designing the visitor experience based on the concept of one or more essential questions may have several benefits. The essential questions go beyond exhibit-centric information and frame all interpretation in the service of a higher, more important objective that feels more relatable to the visitors, thus offering a reason to truly care for the interpretation. The underlying essential question can make the experience meaningful and engaging and provoke discussion and interaction between users who visit the site together.

The concept of essential questions informs experience design at different stages and in multiple ways:

Informing the Experience Concept

Starting with a specific essential question can inform the experience concept and scenario. It gives the museum curator and experience designer a clear objective as to which direction the experience should follow and what would be its general concept. In the case of the Criminology Museum, the concept of how scientific research informed criminal investigatory practice led to the concept of the introductory interactive storytelling app where the user becomes a criminal investigator of the past.

Selecting Interpretation Material to Include in the Experience

With the essential question as a guide, the experience designer may inform the selection of particular exhibits to include. In the aforementioned example, a variety of exhibits was selected to frame criminal investigation evidence within their “natural” context, a crime scene.

Promoting Visitor Engagement through Reflection and Dialogue

Sparking the interest of the visitor through an experience designed to address an essential question is one possible use of the concept. Essential questions can also be built more directly into the experiences, promoting reflection or fostering meaningful dialogue between visitors. As it has been demonstrated also in our previous work, social interaction and dialogue in a cultural heritage context can significantly enhance the visitor experience and cultivate historical empathy (Perry et al., 2019).

The aforementioned advantages of an essential questions-based approach indeed apply to any cultural heritage site. However, in the case of a dark heritage site, they offer a strong and viable alternative to taking advantage of the more macabre and shocking aspects of the site to promote engagement. As is the case with the Criminology Museum, in all such sites of death and horror, the macabre is there, intensely present, and it is bound to attract the visitor’s attention like a magnet. Structuring a digital experience around the more general conceptual issues of human nature, however, can promote a deeper understanding and meaning making and lead to a more profound experience for visitors than the easily accomplished, strong emotional response to a horror site.

Conclusions and Future Work

In this paper, we explore the potential of an essential questions-inspired digital storytelling experience in a dark heritage setting. Following a user-centered design methodology, we developed a two-part digital storytelling experience for the Criminology Museum of the University of Athens. We combined a brief interactive storytelling experience to introduce criminal investigation practices in the beginning of the 20th century to be experienced before the visit, with a selection of individual object stories to be experienced within the visit. Through iterative design and evaluation, we examine the effectiveness of our approach.

Although the evaluation is still on-going and our results not yet conclusive, our findings so far are promising. Informing a digital experience with the notion of essential questions seems to contribute to a meaningful and engaging experience and is more bound to provoke reflection, discussion, and interaction between users who visit the site together.

We continue to research this approach in the Criminology Museum as an ideal setting. Are there really more “essential” questions than those related to death and human nature?

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Criminology Museum staff and collaborating experts Dr. Maria Stefanidou-Loutsidou, Dr. Constantinos Moraitis, Dr. Zoe Sakki and Dr. Sotiris Athanasellis for their collaboration for this work. This work has been partly funded by EMOTIVE. EMOTIVE has received funding from the Horizon 2020 EU Framework Programme for Research and  innovation under grant agreement n° 727188.

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Dark Tourism as History: Dark Tourism in History

MacAnally Professor of Tourism Behaviour and Travel History, University of Limerick

• Published: 19 December 2022
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Dark tourism or, thanatourism, a term used as an encyclopaedic alternative (Jafari 1996, 578) 1 , only emerged as a collective area of named study in the last decade of the twentieth century. Both terms had their origins in the recognition of the long history and widespread occurrence of traveling encounters with different kinds of engineered and orchestrated remembrance of the dead. Many may have originally been an accidental or incidental by-product of travel, but increasingly they became deliberate goals of different kinds of pilgrimage, the most important being religious, but others being more secular (e.g. visiting the graves of writers, historic battlefields). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these occasional, sepulchral encounters were increasingly transformed into purposeful, mass tourism practices, induced by new ideologies of an evolving, European modernity, among them: antiquarianism, Romanticism, the gothic and patriotic displays of national pageantry and imperial display. Dark tourism’s identifying activity, visitation to commemorative sites, inherently makes it a travel form likely to feature more frequently in debates around “the politics of remembrance,” an expanding multi-cultural domain about the continuing status of historical events and figures. The chapter finishes with an illustrative, case history exemplifying some of the main issues in remembrance and remembrancing, in the context of a recent addition to dark tourism repertoires—the visitation of flooded villages as industrial disaster sites.

Dark Tourism is a concept relatively new to the world of tourism studied by social scientists, and even more so in the “real world” of travel and tourism experienced by many millions of global travelers. Yet “dark” encounters are among the oldest of travel encounters, and ones that can be widely recognized in contemporary life once the ideas behind what may seem an odd linguistic conjunction (“dark” plus “tourism”) are recognized.

This chapter is in two parts and addresses two main, historical questions, one of which is academic; the other one of praxis . The first is about the origins of dark tourism as a named entity in the academic study of recreational choice. The second is about its main experiential features in historical travel patterns. The two parts are inextricably linked since academic discussion about what dark tourism is affects what past practices are recognized as its history, and even the extent to which it has a history. The inquiry appraises dark tourism’s defining forms, the similarities and dissimilarities within them, and their significance in social and societal terms.

The chapter ends with a case study of an environmental and community disaster, the flooding and submersion of a village, induced 150 years ago as collateral damage in industrial development that was to be widely repeated around the world later. It has emerged as a new kind of dark tourism attraction. Its trajectory from disaster site to visitor attraction marks a central theme in this chapter about the nature of dark tourism, as remembrance of fatality and mortality that is inherently susceptible to revision, as ways of remembering people, and to remember as events change in society. The case also demonstrates the impact of visual images, particularly photography and film, in effecting and affecting remembrance.

The Academic Discovery of Dark Tourism

Dark tourism first entered academic inquiry in 1996 in a collection of articles in a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage ( IJHS ), edited by John Lennon, and later in a book cowritten with Malcolm Foley. 2 The name suggested a striking paradox: that tourism, the recreational form often satirized as the “have-a-nice-day” industry, might not always be the pursuit of light, life, and happiness, but a taste for commercial encounters with death exemplified, for example, in visiting celebrity memorials, genocide sites, and war cemeteries. The notion was one that was to provoke modest, moral panic in the media about commercialization of death, 3 reminiscent of public anxieties about “resurrection men” who sold corpses—murdered or snatched from city graveyards—to medical institutions in the 1830s. 4 In fact, “resurrection men” would not fit Lennon and Foley’s vision of what dark tourism was. They argued that it was a postmodern eruption, “an interest in recent death, disaster and atrocity … in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries … a product of circumstances of the late modern world and a significant influence upon these circumstances.” 5 Though recognizing that earlier kinds of travel encounters with death might resemble dark tourism, they were excluded because there was no evidence of intentional visitation, and they had not happened “within living memory.” The view bore similarities to the hypothesis of postmodern “black spots” by the sociologist Chris Rojek for sites where traumatic events had taken place that were visited as touristic “escape attempts” from the world of everyday life. 6 There was the suggestion that the new tourism was suspect in consumer terms (“a fascination with assassination” was the title of one article on the Kennedy assassination), a commodification of death as spectacle for paying visitors. 7 Since all three hailed dark tourism as postmodern, it logically had no significant history. It was the unprecedented shape of things coming and to come. Research case studies in Lennon and Foley’s book Dark Tourism exemplified this neophiliac premise with the inclusion of four chapters on the Jewish Holocaust, and individual ones on the John F. Kennedy assassination, the war sites of the two world wars, and tourism developments in partitioned North Cyprus. An alternative approach to dark tourism appeared in the same issue of IJHS and a later one. 8 It treated the subject under a different name, thanatourism, defined as: “travel to a location wholly, or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death, particularly, but not exclusively, violent death.” 9 This perspective extended the history of dark tourism and the travel experiences within it from a few major atrocity sites in the present to many more going back into the distant past. Thanatourism, it was argued, was not just travel to view atrocities and disasters that had “happened in living memory.” It derived from older, Judeo-Christian traditions of pilgrimage and thanatopsis, prescribing reflection on mortality to their followers. Such thoughts were induced and aided by devotional texts and artifacts which carried memento mori –messages to the living that one day they must die, and ars moriendi counseling on how to do it well. 10 Thanatourism could thus be seen as travel that brought death to the mind, and pilgrimage a way of paying homage to others who had gone before. “Thanatourism” was a more neutral term than “dark tourism” because it lessened the transgressive associations of the word “dark” in recognition that not all traveling encounters with death held sinister undertones. Though Holocaust and genocide memorials evoked unspeakable crimes, paying homage to fallen soldiers and visiting graves of poets and other revered groups and individuals did not. Moreover, the name thanatourism located it more explicitly as a subset of thanatology. 11 The paper offered a constitutive typology of five thanatouristic and dark tourism travel categories:

travel to witness public enactments of death, a form largely proscribed in modern Western societies, though once common in gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome, and in public executions in Britain until 1868;

travel to see the sites of multiple fatality (e.g. Holocaust sites, the battlefield of Waterloo, the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, where a Pan-Am jet was brought down by a terrorist bomb in 1988), and sites of individual deaths ranging from roadside memorials for accident victims, to “blue plaque” domestic sites where cultural celebrities had died;

travel to internment sites and memorials to the dead in graveyards, catacombs, and war cemeteries;

travel to view material evidence or symbolic representations of death, in locations unconnected with their occurrence including, police and military museums, and many kinds of exhibition, including the “Chamber of Horrors” in Madame Tussaud’s which displayed artifacts of murder (weapons, victims’ clothing) alongside wax effigies of the serial killers responsible; and

travel for reenactments of historic carnage, particularly battlefield simulations, staged by members of societies dedicated to particular wars, e.g., Civil War Societies in Britain and America, and Napoleonic battle societies in Europe.

A Historiography of Dark Tourism

Whatever the differences in periodizing and characterizing it, the notion of tourism as “dark” acted as a “refresh” button for researchers who had previously never made a link between the two. For students it was, and has remained, a popular option for undergraduate and postgraduate studies in leisure and tourism. Whether called “dark tourism” or “thanatourism,” the effect was to detonate a developing literature of journal articles, book chapters and conference papers over the next two decades, as well as journalistic attention. 12

The first decade (1996 to 2005) was dominated by ad hoc case studies of individual sites and events that fell into three of the five, dark tourism categories: travel to death sites; travel to internment sites; and travel to view exhibited evidence and symbolic representations. Research subjects included Holocaust sites, 13 historic battlefields, 14 slavery sites in the United Kingdom and the United States, 15 criminal museums and prisons, 16 cemeteries as visitor attractions, 17 and celebrity death sites. 18

The first phase of dark tourism research also included alternative conceptual typologies to the five-attribute category initially proposed. The late Graham Dann produced a site typology of four alliterative thanatourism categories: “houses of horror, “fields of fatality,” “tours of torment,” and “themed thanatos.” Within each were subsumed eleven constitutive subcategories, also alliteratively named (“Morbid museums,” “the Hell of Holocaust,” “Cemeteries for Celebrities,” etc.), followed by a discussion of eight motivations that included “fear of phantoms,” “chasing change,” and “yearning for yesteryear.” 19 Other typologies included those of Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, 20 who adapted a spectrum model of dark tourism, as originally suggested by Tony Seaton, 21 but using different and more numerous criteria for grading sites and experiences that scored them on a darkest/lightest scale, a line of development later pursued by Rachael Raine. 22

Case study work also included investigations into key questions of motivation for dark travel, and that of whether dark tourists were an identifiable segment whose behavior varied sui generis from that of other kinds of tourist (e.g. cultural tourists, golf tourists etc.), or whether the notion of dark tourism was a concept that concealed several kinds of distinctive behavior, each with its own clients and motivations (e.g., Holocaust visitors, battlefield walkers, churchyard, and graveyard visitors). One attempt to identify an overarching motivation behind all dark tourism was the sequestration thesis, first put by Geoffrey Gorer in 1964, 23 revisited briefly by Seaton, 24 and more extensively by Stone. 25 The thesis proposed that death was a taboo subject, suppressed or, in Stone’s terms, made “absent” in modern living, thus depriving people of opportunities for thanatopsis which had been normal in the past. Dark tourism, it was claimed, restored mediated links between the living and the dead, by allowing tourists an existential space to reflect, through gazing on the death sites of “significant others,” on their own mortality. Problems with the thesis later focused on the meaning of “sequestration” and “death … made absent,” since the notion was capable of three different meanings and interpretations: the silencing of thanatopsis (i.e., social suppression of reflection and discussion of death); the exclusion of cultural representations of death (e.g., in art, literature, and the mass media); and the ways in which modern funerary practices removed custody of the body from home and family, and consigned its storage, treatment, and disposal to industry professionals. Gorer had most in mind the latter effect, one which dark tourism could hardly address since, unlike bodysnatching, 26 it was never an intervention in the physical treatment and disposal of bodies by the funeral industry or anyone else. There were also problems with accepting assertions that modern society sequesters or makes “absent” representations of death, given the volume of coverage of war, violence, and murder which routinely colonize media news and entertainment, in print, broadcasting, and increasingly in the privately supplied and leaked photo exposures of social media. It is only if “absence” is treated as the normative silencing of reflection and discussion of death in society, that dark tourism could appear as a restorative experience, precipitating discussions of mortality which would not otherwise take place. Stone, in his work on responses to a body parts exhibition mounted internationally by Gunter Von Hagen, found it did provoke some ontological discussions of life and death among visitors. 27 Similarly, an exhibition of skeletons from different periods, recovered during building excavations in London, generated involvement and reflections on death among secondary school children, when exhibited at the Welcome Library in the capital in 2008. They were, however, primarily in response to questions asked in a self-completion survey administered as part of the visit. 28

No common, general motivation emerged from any of the many, separate surveys of specific “dark” activities. Indeed, some research respondents, when asked, denied interest in, “encounters with death” as a reason for visits, and named different ones, including, interests in history, heritage, education, and, for Australian and New Zealand tourists traveling to Gallipoli, national pride in viewing the site of Anzac, military coming-of-age during World War I. 29 Except in the case of Holocaust visits and battlefield tours, dark encounters were not always discrete, premeditated choices, but made as part of a multistop, package tour schedules. Thus, after a decade or more, research was no nearer to isolating generic motivations for dark travel, or producing a plausible profile of those who could be definitively hailed as, “the real Dark Tourists revealed.” 30 Dark tourism, it seemed, could not be segmentally profiled like other kinds of niche tourism. Moreover, some suppliers of dark tourism, including battlefield tour operators and cemetery managers, did not accept that the business they were in should be characterized as “dark.” Dark tourism thus appeared to be a transaction involving two groups of missing persons: the consumers and the suppliers. This was a problem that had never existed historically when dark encounters were incidental, and had yet to be viewed and named as a transactional market between consumers and suppliers.

Another problem in dark tourism’s discursive evolution was one from within its own academic ranks. This was about its “theoretical fragility,” a phrase that briefly became something of a mantra. 31 Was it anything but a magpie, a hybrid of ideas derived from other disciplinary areas and applied to an endless case of samples? Questions of disciplinary coherence and overlap were most directed at dark tourism’s relations to heritage studies, and its subaltern forms, “dissonant heritage” and “contested heritage,” first explored by John E. Tunbridge and Gregory J. Ashworth. 32 Tazim Jamal and Linda Lelo commented on its crossover features; “a dark tourist,” they noted, might equally be called a “heritage tourist” or a “secular pilgrim.” 33 Duncan Light appraised dark tourism’s relationship with heritage, calling it a “troubled” field. 34 A year later, a reference text, the Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies made explicit the links between the two in an edited section called, “Tourism and Heritage Landscapes” with coverage of atrocity sites, memorial sites, battlefields, and museums as common areas of interest. 35 In the same year, Glenn Hooper explored the dark tourism/heritage interface in an edited collection of international cases with an introductory chapter by heritage veterans Tunbridge and Ashworth. 36

There was no resolution to these internal debates. In retrospect they look like “turf wars” among academics arguing over disciplinary ownership and proprietary rights to comment on issues raised in dark tourism debate. The most pertinent observation, perhaps, about its existence as a distinct and legitimate field of inquiry was that within a decade work in the new field problematized issues and generated inquiries about the relationship between tourism, travel, and death that had never previously been recognized or addressed in any discipline.

And it went on doing so. Work in dark tourism expanded in the second decade of the twenty-first century in conferences, journals, and books which included four edited collections. 37 The subject also expanded in undergraduate and postgraduate programs internationally. Holocaust studies, the best funded in research terms, dominated the field in number of outputs in disciplinary publications. Other disasters and atrocities appeared in research agendas: the Chernobyl nuclear accident, 38 Rwanda genocide, 39 and Dallen Timothy produced a wide-ranging overview of dark tourism in the USA. 40 The novelty of its name and the focus on modern, mega-instances implicitly made dark tourism seem an ultracontemporary phenomenon; it is difficult to open any guidebook or travel memoir of the last two centuries that does not include the “dark” practices of grave visiting, memorial trips, battlefield tourism, and so forth.

Dark Tourism and the Politics of Remembrance

In the new millennium a number of geopolitical events and trends began to affect the status of dark tourism. The events included continuing conflicts following the break-up of Eastern Europe, particularly in the Crimea and the Ukraine; conflicts and instability in the Middle East; a second, Western invasion of Iraq; the aftermath of the “9/11 attacks” in America and the growth of world terrorism; and unprecedented movements of people as political refugees and economic migrants. The decade also coincided with several historical anniversaries: the start and finish of World War I and II and specific phases within them (the Battle of Britain, Stalingrad, Pearl Harbor, D-Day landings, etc.); the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 ; and the 1916 uprising in Ireland. All of them were issues that came with historical baggage that stirred up feelings about the past, and triggered public debate, among groups inside and outside the countries involved, on what past events had been and how they should be commemorated, if at all. Conflicting versions of historical blame and praise multiplied and, owing to the growth of social media, minority views gained currency that might have gone unheard in predigital times.

The results were rising protests against narratives that were once unchallenged, and direct action at sites where they were commemorated. Monuments, statues, and memorials were vandalized or removed. In Iraq the pulling down of Saddam Hussein’s statue was orchestrated and filmed for international TV news to valorize the triumphant closure of a Western invasion that later created anarchy. Statues of former communist leaders were removed from public spaces in ex-Soviet bloc countries, but provoked protests in Lithuania, when bought by an entrepreneur to exhibit as theme park attractions. At Corpus Christi College, Oxford, students demanded the removal of a statue commemorating Cecil Rhodes, which for nearly a century had celebrated a British imperialist whose legacies funded scholarships at Oxford. In 2019 a Sino-Western war of words broke out at the removal and standardization of Muslim graves in Uyghur cemeteries in Xinjiang Province of China, criticized by Western observers as cultural erasure, and even genocide of a religious minority, which had inhabited the area for centuries.

In academia historians and social scientists had, for a decade, become increasingly interested in forms of ethnic, national, and sectional narratives of the past. The 1990s saw a spate of book-length studies on remembrance and the writing of history, 41 including a Companion to Historiography of almost 1,000 pages. 42 In the social sciences there was exponential growth, following Edward Said’s work on “Orientalism,” of postcolonial studies into the ways Western cultures had historically represented non-Western cultures as inferior, and not infrequently as transgressive kinds of “other.” 43 These developments, which have since become known issues in “the politics of identity and remembrance,” had direct implications for those working in heritage and dark tourism. Heritage discourse and management had previously been a rather genteel world where specialist curators in museums or galleries made aesthetic choices and professional judgments about what was installed and remembered. It increasingly became one fraught with political perils, which were increasingly discussed. 44 Remembrance had traditionally been a semisacred concept, meaning a state of private reflection on loss and bereavement; or, as metonymy for memorials and rituals commemorating national tragedies, as in, “Ceremonies of Remembrance” and “Gardens of Remembrance.” In the 2000s remembrance became a more contentious notion, weaponized by critics for interrogating the legitimacy of some commemorative displays, and the power structures authorizing them.

For dark tourism the questions provoked were fundamental. The protests and direct action at sites of remembrance called into question what dark tourism was or, to borrow Wittgenstein’s interrogative phrase, what “state of affairs” it represented; 45 and particularly whether it was about encounters with death. None of the protests at commemorative sites were encounters with death—which has and always will be an unknown abstraction—but physical tilts directed at physical installations: headstones, statues, monuments, memorial tablets, and ritual ceremonies. Was this not also true of dark tourism encounters? The praxis in dark tourism had, it transpired, never been encounters with death but with visits to sites created or marked as remembrance. Bringing it more in line with what was the real “state of affairs” surely meant abandoning “death” as the focal encounter, and accommodating material remembrance as the experiential goal. A revised definition, aimed to reflect these realities, was proposed that frames dark tourism as “encounters with the engineering and orchestration of remembrance of mortality or fatality” (where mortality was death from natural causes, while fatality was premature decease, in violent, nefarious, or spectacular circumstances). 46 The revised focus revealed a number of “states of affairs” that had not previously been obvious. There were four principal ones: First, that it is the living , not the dead , who have both the first and the last word in remembrance in the control they exert over the engineered choice, siting and orchestration of commemorative measures; and second, they also retain the power to change the nature of remembrance in the future. This power may be limited for family memorials with restricted audiences which are typically extant for only a few generations. Where commemoration is targeted at mass audiences for longer, indefinite periods by national bodies and great public or private corporations, it becomes significant social engineering. In democracies this is likely to involve the active or passive consent of several, or many, stakeholders likely to be exposed to, or affected by, what commemoration is being engineered, and how the orchestration is accomplished. Engineers of public remembrance may thus be called to account before, during, and after commemorative measures are put in place. Third, that the remembrance perspective affects the way the history of dark tourism is viewed. It makes it difficult to imagine it as a latter-day innovation concerned only with atrocity and disasters in modern times. It makes it coeval with the history of human communities on earth, since most known societies have engineered and orchestrated remembrance of the dead in big and small ways. The Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans all erected public monuments and left inscriptions for remembering and honoring religious figures, and inculcating homage to emperors, kings, and other potentates. They were installed in public places for exposure to local and regional populations as they went about their business and, to a lesser extent, to impress foreign visitors. Many people would have had encounters with them, but they would have mainly been incidental and unplanned, except in special circumstances where the memorial itself became the message, rather than the subject it celebrated, and attracted curious visitors in its own right. This was the case, according to enduring myth, with the Seven Wonders of the World. 47 Fourth, crucially, in academic terms, conceptualizing dark tourism as travel encounters with engineered remembrance, makes it a quintessential study area in the wider study of the “politics of remembrance.”

Dark Tourism as Praxis in History

Dark tourism, as travel tastes for visiting sites and spaces commemorating different kinds and intensities of mortality and fatality, only grew to be a generic tourism preoccupation in Britain and Europe in the late-eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries. Before that for around 200 years, the dominant tourism form had been the Grand Tour, which accorded no particular importance to representations of death sui generis (see Verhoeven , this volume). 48 It was a European ritual tour, routed mainly through France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland for young aristocrats and the gentry. Lasting up to three years, its manifest purpose was as a crash course in classical antiquity, Christian history, and art viewed in galleries, churches, cathedrals and other public buildings. It was also often a form of social bonding and hedonistic indulgence among European elites ( Seaton 2019 ) 49

Representations of mortality and fatality were, in fact, abundant among Christian paintings, sculptures, and buildings viewed by Grand Tourists, but were viewed primarily as religious and artistic exhibits, rather than with any of the cultural relativism that underpins inspection through the prism of the “politics of remembrance.” The default stance of grand tourists was to regard their own cultural assumptions, religious and nationalistic, as normative and universalistic ones. The only sepulchral encounters they had with sites that were coded with less prescriptive cultural meanings were campo santo sites in Rome, Naples, and Pisa, which were mass burial sites for the poor, and ossuaries where the bones of the dead were displayed in catacomb as curiosities rather than homilies. 50 In Rome even catacombs could be viewed as religious shrines rather than macabre spectacles, since they had been early Christian meeting places, and some of their walls bore graffiti that could pass as sacred art. By contrast, dark tourism, as a widespread travel preoccupation with representations of death, was a product of changing material and ideological factors at work in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Some involved reinvention and repurposing. Some were new.

Pilgrimage Renewed and Reinvented

Pilgrimage had been a long-standing tradition in Christendom of visiting sites at home and abroad associated with sacred figures (see Craig , this volume). Abroad meant Palestine, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and for Catholics, it included Rome. There was also a network of British shrines to lesser Christian saints and martyrs, the most important being that of Thomas Becket (1120–1170) at Canterbury. During the Reformation, Protestant countries abolished pilgrimage as a Catholic superstition that was denounced by religious leaders and humanists, the most notable being Erasmus. It made a “dark” comeback in several ways. The first was during and after the Napoleonic Wars, when English visitors to France began to make excursions to Catholic churches and monasteries—previously seen as the devil’s abodes—to witness the mob destruction or vandalism of ecclesiastical property during the French Revolution. The prime site was Saint Denis, the Cathedral where French kings and queens had been buried. There artifacts and monuments, torn from churches and monasteries were put on display for visitors as a makeshift “museum.” The result appalled English tourists so that after nearly 300 years of demonization, Catholic clergy came to be seen as Christian comrades-in-arms, and victims of an anti-Christ who was no longer the Pope, but Napoleon. My enemy’s enemy had become my friend. Thomas Cook and Son revived pilgrimage to pre-Reformation destinations with tours to Rome, the Vatican, Palestine, and the Holy Land (see Barton , this volume). 51

In addition to these revivals, a new kind of secular pilgrimage grew up during the nineteenth century to places commemorating celebrities of nation and empire. In Britain the graves, memorial monuments and death sites of literary and artistic figures, particularly poets, 52 became shrines that coexisted alongside those for more official figures. In Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s, poets and novelists shared monuments and memorials with royal and ecclesiastical notables. Elsewhere in Britain, the last whereabouts and resting places of celebrities formed a growing dark tourism circuit which were widely publicized in travel memoirs, illustrated guidebooks, and magazine features by writers, some of whom specialized as paparazzi of the posthumous. One was William Howitt whose “Homes and Haunts of the British Poets” comprised essays on the geographical origins and deaths of thirty-six writers. 53 A dozen editions were sold over the next sixty years. He had previously published another much-reprinted book of dark tours in the North that included: celebrity memorials and burial places (St. Bede and Thomas Bewick, the celebrated wood engraver), battlefields (Culloden and Flodden), mining disasters, murders, executions, and apparitions. 54 A work that drew more explicit analogies between “pilgrimage” and dark tourism was by Mrs. Samuel Carter Hall, wife of the editor of the Art Journal who in 1850 published “Pilgrimages to English Shrines.” It was successful enough for her to bring out a sequel two years later which included an authorial aside, hinting at the pleasurable schadenfreude that lurks in certain kinds of dark tourism encounter: “Pilgrimages! what is life but a pilgrimage over graves! The older we grow, the better we comprehend the force of this sad truth; life is indeed a ‘pilgrimage over graves;’ but how different are the ideas and emotions they suggest or excite.” 55 The two volumes included chapters on tombs, death sites and memorials to writers and artists, among them: Christopher Wren, Thomas Flaxman, Thomas Gray, and William Hogarth, with additional chapters on the execution of Lady Jane Grey, and the plague village of Eyam whose residents quarantined themselves to likely death in order not to spread the disease.

A related influence on dark tourism was antiquarianism. Like pilgrimage, this was nothing new. It was a legacy of the Renaissance revival of interest in classical antiquity among educated European elites in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in part politically and patriotically generated by the growth of new nation-states and dynasties such as the Tudors, when rulers and ruled joined forces in discovering evidence of ancient, cultural traditions. This involved enthusiastic searches for written texts, artifacts, and sites of architectural and archaeological significance involving quests to libraries, burial grounds, ruins, and ancient ecclesiastical foundations where they pored over old documents, memorial tablets, tomb inscriptions, and other sepulchral survivals.

Antiquarians increased throughout the seventeenth century, leading to the foundation of the Society of Antiquaries in 1717–1718. 56 Its members were periodically satirized as eccentric old men, shut off from real life by their fixation with musty books, moldering remains, and fragments of broken artifacts. Nonetheless, the antiquarian mindset increased among educated travelers across Europe, particularly after the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 1740s, where excavations captivated generations of tourists in Italy. 57 In Britain, antiquarianism became a gentlemanly hobby, often among clerics discovering local history in their parish travels. It resulted in the publication of substantial town and county histories, as well as briefer guidebook information for visitors to individual churches. Antiquarianism, in conjunction with archaeology, led to a desire for take-home mementos, which tempted visitors to chip off fragments from sites at home and abroad. 58

The Dark Appeals of Romanticism

More powerful than pilgrimage or antiquarianism in its impact on dark tourism was that of romanticism, a complex cultural phenomenon characterized as, “a heterogeneous mixture of philosophic, aesthetic, religious and emotional concepts.” 59 It colonized middle-class aesthetic tastes throughout the nineteenth century, providing escapes from the prosaic or oppressive realities of industrialization and urbanization at home, to the imagined worlds of other places and other times in literature, music, and art. Tourism gave physical reality to some of these longed-for romantic contrasts: in landscape tastes (picturesque scenery in Italy, the Lake District, and Wales); among traditional, rural populations (peasant communities in regional dress in Brittany and Scotland); through exposure to traditional myths and folklore in books with titles such as Legends of the Rhine and Border Ballads of Scotland; 60 in attending regional festivals of song and dance; and in brief retreats from the modernity of railway conveyance to retro-travel forms (jaunting-carts in Ireland, camel rides during Holy Land tours, and pony trekking through Iceland, a land with few roads and no railways). 61

Dark tourism offered two of the most powerful forms of escape into romantic otherness. The first was the world of the past and the second was vicarious experience of death, the most feared and mysterious of all “others.” The past was where the dead had lived and died, and there were special places where their presence lingered. Reflections on death, once devotional practices at home, became recreational trips further afield: in visiting celebrity memorials, battle fields, and in enjoying the more frivolous pleasures of ghost trains, haunted houses, and other fairground attractions.

These dark tastes and recreations were critically affected by sociological factors arising from population change and revolutionary developments in the production and consumption of printed words and images from the late-eighteenth century onwards. Printing moved from being a hand-powered craft that had hardly changed in the 300 years since Caxton, to a modern, machine production technology, capable of producing thousands, rather than hundreds, of copies per day of newspapers, magazines, and cheap books. Costs fell, allowing more people to buy them, and literacy grew. The result was an expanding audience for reading of all kinds. It was most potent among the middle classes, but it was also observable among sections of laboring populations where the growing take-up of cheap reading was satirized in the 1830s as the “March of Intellect.” 62 The net effect was that new ideas circulated more quickly than ever before. Without the printed word the concepts and activities, later recognized as romantic, including those that primed dark tourism, would never have taken hold.

Two key ideas that permeated the landscapes and dreamscapes of romanticism were the Gothic and sublime. The Gothic was an aesthetic categorization, variously applied in judgments of architecture, ecclesiastical decoration, and literature from c. 1740 and throughout the nineteenth century, that implicitly drew a binary contrast between the rule-governed styles of classical cultures and the more unruly, plenitude of vernacular ones. In architecture and art the Gothic Revival meant a crusading preference for indigenous Anglo-Saxon styles found, it was claimed, in medieval, Christian church buildings of England, France, and Germany, with their soaring heights, pointed arches, and abundant decorative effects, in opposition to the geometric restraint and laws of classical and Palladian styles from Greece and Italy. Its proponents included Augustus Pugin, John Ruskin, Walter Scott, and less well-known, but important opinion-formers in publishing and graphic reproduction. One was the prolific engraver, John Britton, who published many, finely illustrated viewbooks depicting Gothic buildings at home and abroad; and John Parker, the Oxford religious publisher who specialized in gothic ecclesiastical design. 63 All extended the province of dark tourism.

Of equal impact to dark tourism was Gothic literature, which first emerged in the mid-eighteenth century in the sepulchral travelogues of a literary group who became known as “graveyard” writers. Three of the most successful were Edward Young, with his poem “Night Thoughts” (1749); Robert Blair with his poem, “The Grave” (1743); and in 1746, James Hervey, with a prose work called “Meditations among the Tombs.” The themes they explored—the brevity of life, the inevitability of death, the need to reflect and prepare for eternity—were conventional, thanatoptic ones, common in memento mori and ars moriendi texts going back to the Middle Ages. The difference was that previously “the grave” had been symbolic shorthand for death; in the work of Young, Blair, and Hervey it was also physical location, described at length or imagined in visceral detail as a visitor attraction. Hervey’s book had been inspired by a tour of Cornwall when he had stopped off at a village church in Kilkhampton, Devon, to read epitaphs in the churchyard and memorial tablets within the church. None of these works, however, came close to the crowning achievement of graveyard travelogues by Thomas Gray with his Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard. 64 Published in the 1750, it remains the best-known poem of the eighteenth century and one which has given country churchyards an iconic place in English culture and dark tourism. 65 The precincts of Stoke Poges Church in Buckinghamshire, which is believed to have inspired it, has a large, stone memorial to Gray and his work, and his grave is close to the church entrance. All four works were forerunners of what has been described as, “the therapeutically melancholic side of Romanticism.” 66 William Blake, the most Gothic of all English artists, later illustrated editions of all three works, and William Wordsworth took time off from poetry for writing prose essays on epitaphs and memorials. 67

An even more influential form than graveyard travelogues in dark tourism creation was the Gothic novel. It was a genre of horror and sensation that has been called “literary terrorism,” which was first introduced in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and followed by Anna Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) , and then by a torrent of works that were to fill a bibliography by Montague Summers that was over five hundred pages long. 68 Their plots were characteristically set abroad in Catholic countries, especially Italy, where superstition and transgression reigned in castles, monasteries, and haunted houses, freely equipped with locked rooms, secret cabinets, dungeons, and supernatural apparitions. The villains were evil monks, depraved noblemen and wicked guardians, who preyed on innocent orphans and helpless women relatives. Gothic novels enjoyed a runaway success between 1760 and the 1830s, particularly among women readers, a trend satirized in Jane Austen’s novel, Northanger Abbey published in 1818. It then declined, but morphed into mystery novels with more domestic, contemporary settings by Sheridan Le Fanu, Edgar Alan Poe, and Wilkie Collins. The Gothic played an important part in influencing the perceptions of place that tourists took with them on their travels at home and abroad. It can be found in the attraction of visiting ancient castles, ruined monasteries, haunted houses, and locations with pronounced—which means “promoted”—atmospherics of gloom, decay, and the uncanny. 69 Historians too affected Gothic travel perceptions in offering a Lapsarian view of the world which emphasized the destructive effects of time and change on places and people. In England Edward Gibbon’s work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1787), became a bestselling sensation. Inspiration for it came when he wandered as a tourist among the ruins of ancient Rome, and then spent more than ten years writing a six-volume work trying to account for how they were all that was left of an empire that had ruled Europe for 600 years. In France, almost coincidentally, Constantin Volney published The Ruins of Empire , 70 a philosophical work which also made the ravages of time, change, and death an underlying leitmotif. Both works were translated and inculcated a mindset among educated, European tourists who made it de rigeur to view landscapes that evoked melancholic reflections on death and oblivion, while enjoying the pleasant, recreational Schadenfreude of knowing that they had not yet become victims, and would soon be returning safe from their excursions to hotel or pensione for a well-earned meal. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley encapsulated this dark tourism mindset in his sonnet, “Ozymandias,” which describes the metaphorical tears he shed in stumbling upon the bust and remains of a once-great monarch of all that he surveyed, abandoned and half-hidden in the sand. 71

Romanticism and the Gothic incorporated a related ideology that became inscribed in dark tourism praxis. It was that of the sublime, a classical concept given new life by Edmund Burke in a slim volume first printed in 1757. 72 It was a treatise on aesthetics that proposed a simple idea—that aesthetic pleasure was not necessarily tranquil contemplation of beauty in art or life; it could also be found in disturbing natural or man-made phenomena that provoked fear, particularly if they were indistinct or partly obscured (e.g., in mist, semidarkness, or storm clouds). Sublime thrills became desiderata of the dark tourist gaze, in which delight competed with shock and awe in exposure to violence in nature (volcanoes, great waterfalls, storms at sea, etc.); displays of massed human power (scenes of destruction, and orchestrated, military parades); and supernatural narratives. All these ideas account for a long-standing paradox: that what is apparently “seen” with the eye is actually the preconditioned mind encountering and recognizing the cultural coding invested in sights and sites. It is antecedent conditioning which turns spaces into places, and “stuff happening” into significant form and occasion.

Cemeteries and the Transformations of Internment

Dark tourism tastes were not just down to new ideas processed by imagination. There were more visceral factors which affected the repertoires of dark tourism which resonated physically in Britain and Europe. A macabre one in rapidly growing cities was how and where to bury the dead—and keep them buried. Until the mid-eighteenth-century graveyards were plain affairs with burial sites marked, if at all, with a simple, wooden memorial board, featuring a name and, occasionally, an emblematic sign: a cross or a death’s head carving. Only the gentry had more durable memorials, on brass or marble tablets inside churches on walls or floors, and in full body effigies and head-and-shoulder busts arranged around the sides. Church yards and public burial grounds were less sacrosanct and more plebeian and were sometimes used for mundane, or even profane, activities. Booksellers and market stalls flourished round St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Hogarth depicted gambling taking place in a London church yard; and the artist, Thomas Rowlandson, drew burlesque cartoons of sexual activity on “table-top” tombs.

As populations in towns and cities increased, the situation changed. Spaces for burying the dead began to run out. To cope public authorities stacked bodies closer and higher together, in multiplying tiers, under thinner and thinner coverings of soil, so that burials per acre increased exponentially. The result was that in populous areas graveyards became a health hazard for those living near, as the earth gave up its dead and bodies decomposed near the surface of graves, or actually floated free of them in wet weather. The dangers were revealed in a sensational book by a London surgeon in 1839, 73 and a government report which detailed the “dangerous and fatal results produced by the unwise and revolting custom of inhuming the dead in the midst of the living.” 74 It showed that in some parts of London, the density of corpse distribution was over a thousand per acre. It was followed by a supplementary Parliamentary Report, written by Edwin Chadwick, which statistically analyzed the scale of the health hazards between 1830 and 1840, and looked at practices in Europe for dealing with them. 75

The solution was the garden cemetery, located out-of-town, away from populations and, ideally, in elevated settings swept by fresh, clean air. First adopted in Sweden, they spread through other European countries, including Père Lachaise in Paris in 1804, and in Liverpool and Glasgow in the late 1820s and 1830s. 76 By the time Chadwick’s survey was published the cemetery movement was underway in London with cemeteries opening in Highgate, Nunhead, Brompton, West Norwood, Tower Hamlets, Kensal Green, and Abney Park. They followed functional and aesthetic features proposed by George Alfred Walker and Chadwick. They were also influenced J. C. Loudon’s pioneering work “On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries and on the Improvement of Churchyards,” which became a classic work on sepulchral design. 77

James Curl has written extensively on the architecture and aesthetics of cemeteries and internment nationally 78 and regionally in the United Kingdom (Curl 1977, 1980 , 1981 , 2001 ). 79 The look and character of cemeteries was also improved by the coming of the railways which made easier and cheaper the transportation of monumental stone, thus putting memorials and headstones within the reach and budgets of people previously restricted to local materials or none at all. Rail also shaped the most macabre of all cemeteries: Brookwood in Surrey, which was built to take the overflow of corpses from London and had its own station for receiving them on a single ticket running direct from Waterloo to their final destination. The aesthetics of internment brought about by the garden cemetery revolution was one of the unanticipated consequences of history. Conceived for health reasons as secure resting places for the dead, they evolved as recreational spaces for the living, designed to be within easy reach of visitors, offering picturesque layout and planting and, as time went on, by the architectural variety of their monuments. Guidebooks to all the main London cemeteries were produced that promoted their funerary functionality, but also their picturesque and elegiac effects for dark tourists. Today more than 400 cemeteries belong to the Association of Significant Cemeteries in Europe, founded two decades ago, to promote them as visitor attractions (Felicori and Zanotti 2004; Seaton 2015 ). 80

Another unintended consequence of the cemetery movement was to add a new pastime to the repertoire of middle-class touring, epitaph collecting. Monumental inscriptions had always been prized by antiquarians studying Greek and Roman culture during the Renaissance and later as primary sources of national and local history. On James Harvey’s grave was inscribed a commendation on the value of epitaphs as history and religious lessons in stone:

What biography is to history, an epitaph is to biography. It is a sketch which marks the great outlines of character and excites curiosity to view the portraits as painted on the pages of history. It is likewise an epitome which teaches us … that time is on the wing,—that every rank and age must fall prey to his depredations … (and) that religion is the only defence against the horrors of death, and the only guide to the joys of eternity. 81

This high-minded view was not always apparent in the epitaph literature that flourished in the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, a bibliography listed more than a hundred separate works with titles suggesting that entertainment as much as improvement was the main attraction. Viewing them promised lively titillation as they were named as: ludicrous, merry, queer, panegyrical, satirical, humorous, whimsical, curious, quaint, monkish, and not to be found in any other collection . 82 Epitaphs were also organized by geographic categories: by continents and subcontinents (America, India, Bengal, and Madras); by country (West Indies, France, and Scotland); by towns and cities (London, Westminster, Rome, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Canterbury, and Winchester); and there were compilations of those in single, country churchyards (Cockermouth, Charlton King, and Framlingham). Magazines and journals also featured epitaphs, suggesting their broad and diverse appeals. They appeared in specialist antiquarian and archaeological publications, in the transactions of local history societies, and in general interest magazines with a popular readership including Chambers’s Journal , Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine , Temple Bar, and Household Words (Charles Dickens’s monthly). There were also entries in encyclopedias, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica , and a society dedicated to sepulchral remembrance, The Society for Preserving Memorials of the Dead, published its own magazine between 1883 and 1885. 83

In the USA sepulchral travel and garden cemetery development more than kept pace with European fashions. Internment space was initially abundant and burials were not confined, as in Europe, to demarcated, walled-off, graveyards. This changed as the density of burials per acre increased in settler towns, along with the problems of maintaining graves that became neglected over time. Mount Auburn, the first garden cemetery, was consecrated in 1831 in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Green-Wood in Brooklyn, New York was opened in 1842. Both published illustrated, coffee table guidebooks, 84 and American cemeteries evolved as picturesque developments, competing for public attention by position, plantations, monumental variety, and history. In the 1880s two hundred copies of the first book-length, sepulchral bibliography in the world was published. 85

The cumulative impact of these developments was to foster a sepulchral mindset that particularly affected educated, middle-class touring behavior and generated guidebook recommendations for excursions that included: trips by candlelight round ruined monasteries and monk’s graveyards at Tintern Abbey and other locations in England; midnight descents into catacombs and ossuaries in Europe, accompanied by servants with burning torches; trips round royal and ecclesiastical memorials in Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s, and great religious sites in Europe; exploration of Campo Santos in Italy; visits to the Paris Morgue to gaze at corpses, found dead in the streets or fished up from the Seine; 86 and reverential reflection at the graveside of dead poets and writers wherever they could be found. 87 It also included taking in the fields of Waterloo, the first European battlefield to become a mass tourism site. This involved an all-day drive out from Brussels to view the immense “lion” monument, buy a guidebook written by Edward Cotton, an old soldier turned on-site gift shop and museum entrepreneur, and returning home with battle souvenirs (buttons, badges, and bullets from the battlefield, some of them manufactured, it was said, in Birmingham to meet demand); and folios of Gerard’s lithographs of the principal skirmishing points, memorials and mausolea, none of which featured the French. 88

Governance and Remembrance: The Urban Wallpaper of Mortality and Fatality

A new and less obvious influence on dark tourism generation in Britain during the later nineteenth century was the Victorian state, and the forms of engineered and orchestrated remembrance of mortality and fatality it promoted. These had been inscribed in Britain’s judicial system since medieval times, in the practice of publicly executing and punishing criminals in front of sightseeing crowds, and then distributing their body parts at crossroads, along highways, and on bridges as a warning of the long reach of the law for enemies of the state. 89 In Queen Victoria’s reign these brutal, outdoor displays were terminated by Parliament, but streets and public spaces were retained and progressively reconfigured as different aides memoires about the might and majesty of the Victorian empire. Three initiatives were to affect dark tourism exposure: the state funeral, the progressive expansion of memorial statuary, and blue plaque signage.

Royal funerals had always been ceremonial occasions of “pageants and power,” 90 but until the early nineteenth century they were conducted semi-privately with less overt street-level orchestration. The two earliest to approach the status of national occasions were Nelson’s funeral in 1805 and fifteen years later, that of George III, which drew large crowds on to the streets, with the tolling of church bells, and memorial sermons in London churches and across the provinces. 91

The number and scale of state funerals in Victorian England increased and were extended to nonroyal, national, and imperial celebrities. Their impact was first seen at the funeral of the Duke of Wellington in 1852. He had died on September 14, but agreement between the Crown, the Government, and Parliament on the details of the ceremony took two months, and the funeral did not take place until November 15. It was an unprecedented PR success and tourism bonanza, filling lodging houses and hotels in the metropolis before, during, and after the event. It started with a week during which Wellington’s body lay in state for visitors to pay their respects. A quarter of a million people filed past his coffin. The day itself brought more than a million sightseers on to the streets to watch a processional cortege that took two hours to pass by. They came from all over London. There were also invited VIPs from the provinces: mayors, provosts, and chairs of municipalities and county councils, representatives from religious groups, and from the universities. Also lining the route were thousands of day trippers from across England, who had bought cheap excursion tickets that the railways had refused to allow until the 1850s. It has been estimated that the funeral was watched by half of London and 5 percent of all the people of Great Britain. 92 In towns and cities across the country shops and businesses closed for the day, and people joined the party by proxy, as spectators or participants of memorial services held in provincial churches and cathedrals. The week after another 100,000 visited St Paul’s to see where the great event had taken place. State funerals for non-royal figures later included William Gladstone, David Livingstone, and Major General Charles Gordon of Khartoum. 93 The climactic one of the era was Queen Victoria’s own funeral in 1901, the epic scale of which, as imperial theater and civil religion, can still be witnessed in its processional, gun-carriaged, street-thronged splendor, as the first royal funeral to be filmed and widely photographed. Great royal funerals were necessarily in short supply, and even when royal marriages and jubilees were added to the roll call of national rejoicing, great open-air occasions were still infrequent. However, during the latter half of the century and into the next, two more ubiquitous kinds of street commemoration advanced in London and cities throughout the Empire. The first was the spread of public statues to political, cultural, and military heroes. In 1844 there were only 22 statues; by 1867 there were 41; by 1920, 215; by 1928, 350. In 1981 there were 370 on the outside of Parliament alone, and other government buildings had many more. 94

The second was the development of “blue plaque” signage on London houses and buildings of historic interest, recording, among other things, where national celebrities had lived and died. Until 1900 there were only thirty-four, but in 1901 the new Greater London Council took over responsibility for them, and by 1935 had published five volumes of additions to the stock. 95 Each building was inventoried: by original owner, private, or institutional; by address; and by sponsoring agency when not the Council. Blue plaque signage was official exploitation of the already established tourism fashion for visiting places where the famous had worked and died. The result was that in London, statues, blue plaque sites and memorials, all sited for maximum impact and exposure, surrounded native Londoners and still do so for the 20 million visitors who arrive annually in the metropolis, to wander the streets, or sit out in London’s parks and public gardens.

In addition to these Victorian initiatives, two world wars in the twentieth century have produced an international array of British war memorials, the most numerous being the 1,400 or more in France and Belgium as part of the Imperial, later the Commonwealth, War Graves Commission. 96 Others exist in churchyards, village greens, and on buildings and city walls, throughout Britain.

These official investments in historical remembrance, and other more tourist-oriented animations of Britain’s past, have provoked criticism. Robert Hewison viewed the British “heritage industry” as nostalgic excess, 97 and Patrick Wight saw the presented culture of Britain as fixation with, “living in an old country.” 98 But they miss the point. Irrespective of tourism generation, remembrance of national mortality and fatality have evolved as essential features of governance and state craft across the developed world. They mold historical identity of a country and its people by providing exemplary, or cautionary, role models, to follow or reject, as personification of national values. But no version of remembrance is ever final closure. Historical memory of individuals and events changes according to when they were written and, crucially, by those who control remembrance policies and the resources to implement them. The VE Day celebrations in Western Europe in 2020 provided a suggestive instance of the moving politics of commemoration. Russia was an ally of Britain and America in the victory over Germany, and the Red Army were mythologized at the time as iconic comrades, with a government-backed campaign in the United States and United Kingdom. Russia’s losses to the Nazis amounted to 27 million fatalities. Yet seventy-five years later Russia was written out of official VE celebration agendas in Europe, a “state of affairs” that supports the observations made earlier, that it is the living who engineer and orchestrate remembrance, or silence it.

Although governments and large corporate interests may shape the form and location of commemorative sites of mortality and fatality, their impact as dark tourism may be limited. In London few visitors come specially to view statues or houses, except in rare cases such as the Albert Memorial or Nelson’s Column. More commonly they may register with visitors, if at all, as fleeting, pass-by encounters, that some may stop briefly to read, and, in the case of a blue plaque house, visit when open to the public. This question of impact is crucial. Dark tourism involves a spectrum of different events and locations, ranging from individual street memorials to a few mega-events that dominate media and academic agendas (e.g., Holocaust and other disaster sites). All share a generic identity as engineered and orchestrated remembrance of fatality and mortality, but the volume and quality of the encounters they represent may vary profoundly. Is, for example, being briefly exposed to a blue plaque sign a dark tourism encounter? How long must site contact last “to count” as a significant encounter? How intentional must an encounter be to be authentic? These are difficult questions yet to be answered.

The case history that follows exemplifies some of these issues raised and the ways in which remembrance of fatality and mortality may evolve and change over time. Its subject is one that has received little attention in dark tourism research, that of occupational fatality and community displacement in industrial development. This has not just been about technological change in the production of goods, it also involved new transport networks accompanied by disruptive physical transformation. Canal and railway building required land appropriation, demolition of residential areas, mainly among the urban poor, and often human fatalities in the construction and operation of new transit forms. The case focuses on dam building and urban water supply, and the spectacular obliteration of communities accompanying them, seen on an epic scale in Wales in the 1880s and later internationally. It is the story of the flooding of community spaces and the creation of, perhaps, the most bizarre of all remembered dark tourism sites, the sunken village under the water.

Case Study: Dark Tourism and Remembrance: Vyrnwy, Llanwddyn, and Whalley Bridge 1888–2020

In the summer of 2019 a disaster threatened Whalley Bridge, a small town in Derbyshire, UK. After weeks of unprecedented rainfall, a nearby dam wall threatened to collapse and flood the town below. Residents were evacuated and the nation looked on as engineers fought to prevent the disaster. After six weeks they were successful and evacuees began to return to their homes, only to encounter a new inundation, not of water, but tourists, including “busloads of Chinese” arriving to view the disaster scene that never was. The press, hearing of the tourism revenues among local shopkeepers, hailed a unique situation with the headline: “Disaster tourism arrives in Whaley Bridge after dam incident.” 99 In fact, it was not such a tourism novelty. While Whalley’s fate hung in the balance a rarely seen photographic record had come to light of a dam flooding in rural Wales, more than 130 years before. Llanwddyn was a village of 450 inhabitants in the River Vyrnwy valley, sixty miles from Liverpool, an English industrial city with a population that had more than quadrupled in 50 years. The city’s growth had created recurrent crises in water supply and, after running out of suitable, local options, the Municipal Council identified Llanwddyn as the site for a new reservoir, and sought Parliamentary permission to build a dam, flood the village, and create a lake there. In 1881 an Act was passed allowing development.

Despite local opposition work began on the dam foundations in October 1882. For the next five years a work force of one thousand stone masons and laborers worked on the construction. Forty of them lost their lives in the process. Once the dam was completed the flooding began submerging a church, two chapels, four pubs and around 100 houses. In mitigation of the community catastrophe, the Liverpool Council re-housed residents in a new settlement near the created lake, built a new church on a hillside above it and, nearby a sloping burial ground to which they transferred the bodies and gravestones from the old churchyard. 100

A Council concern throughout the project was the management of public relations in engineering and orchestrating remembrance of the dam development for posterity. Official details of the choice of location, geographical features, costs and engineering features were recorded and publicized. The development was promoted as the first, all-masonry dam in Britain, and the artificial reservoir as the largest in Europe. These details made news in specialist publications and attracted technical sightseers to the Vyrnwy site, during and after the construction. 101

As the development progressed engineered remembrance of the construction was cast more durably in iron, memorial tablets, struck successively to mark three phases of the project: the laying of the foundation stone in 1881; the official Parliamentary conclusion, unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 1910; and changes made between 1933 and 1938. The tablets were sited and mounted at the entrance to the bridge across the dam top, so all visitors had to pass them in crossing on to, or off, the bridge. However, the most powerful form of engineered remembrance, and one that was to establish Vyrnwy’s tourism identity for a century or more, was not textual, but architectural. It was the building of a sporting lodge-cum-hotel above the dam with spectacular views down the lake, and a twelve-mile path around it planted with tree cover. For a century the area became a noted sporting resort for hunting, shooting, and fishing. In 1992 an illustrated hotel history was published. The first chapter described the creation of Vyrnwy as “one of the greatest feats of engineering in the Victorian era,” but the main content was of shooting and fishing records, grand social occasions, and fine dining. 102 The flooding and fatalities in construction received brief mention but the numbers of the dead, it was said, were about the norm for workers killed in comparable industrial projects at the time. There was no mention of resident feelings or opposition to displacement at the unprecedented sinking of a whole village which survive in the disparate evidence of oral tradition and regional news accounts to this day. 103 These can also be sensed in the unexpected reappearance after a century of a large, leather-bound, photographic album, produced by the Liverpool Council for their records, but never widely exhibited. It is in two parts and comprises 21 full-page, before-and-after photographs of the dam construction which lends weight to Lennon’s recent notes on the resonance of photographic imaging in dark tourism generation. 104 Part one depicts the titanic scale of the project: the cavernous excavations, the earth moving-machines (Figure 1 ) and the rise of the dam towering seventy-five feet above the disappeared village, and the pygmy figures of workers among it all (Figure 2 ).

Dam Construction 1.

Dam Construction 2.

Part two offers an elegiac, slower movement to this percussive spectacle. It shows two images of Llanwddyn on a summer afternoon before the flood: a tiny village street, an ancient church, an old-fashioned general store, brothers and sisters holding the hand of little ones (Figure 3 ); and women gossiping at a garden gate, a hen pecking its way through dust, and villagers in working clothes staring, unsmiling, at the camera (Figure 4 ).

Llanwddyn before.

Llanwddyn to be submerged.

For the modern viewer the juxtaposed photographs act as allegorical emblems of a dark effacement, that of a traditional way-of-life buried under the juggernaut of industrial advance. It is remembrance that resonates with walkers who leave the path around Lake Vyrnwy and climb to the church and the memorials in the graveyard on the hill where a hundred exhumed bodies from the flooded churchyard were carried in carts, and reburied, by local people who had lived in the houses that were lost. Similar images exist of demolition during early Victorian railway building but, as lithographic prints, they cast a softer, more picturesque halo over devastation compared with the starker realism of photography that came later. 105

Vyrnwy and Whalley Bridge represent chapters in dark tourism created by flooding in dam and reservoir building that was to be repeated in Britain at: Mardale in Cumbria (1935), 106 Ashopton in Derbyshire (1943), 107 and in the 1960s at Capel Celyn in Wales, less than two hours away from Llanwddyn. 108 All became causes célèbres in which local communities clashed with governmental authorities invoking the primacy of the public good over claims of minority rights. Internationally sunken villages multiplied throughout the twentieth century, becoming collateral damage as mega-water projects proliferated across continents. In the new millennium they have begun to attract website coverage from bloggers, planners, and regional tourism promoters. In 2014 an urban heritage posting hailed the gothic appeal of, “Underwater Ghost Cities & Buildings.” 109 A year later they were identified as a network of generic tourism attractions under the headline, “10 Drowned Towns You Can Visit.” 110 The ten included Villa Epecuén in Argentina which had been an elite resort for the rich and famous since the 1920s, but was submerged when a dam broke in 1985; 111 Shi Cheng, flooded in 1959 to become “China’s ‘Atlantis in the East’” with monuments below the waves going back to 1777; 112 as well as Potosi in Venezuela; 113 and Port Royal in Jamaica. 114 In the United States there were more than sixty locations “flooded by the creation of dams, destroyed by the advancing sea, or washed away in floods and never rebuilt.” They stretched from California to Maryland and New York. 115 Canada became part of this network of nemesis by water with a posting of ten communities submerged in the construction of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. 116 The global spread is so great it has been suggested as an air tour opportunity. 117

The fascination of sunken villages as dark tourism sites—what Bess Lovejoy terms their “mental floss”—rests in their appeals to the mind and imagination. 118 At the outset this lies in their prospective power to obliterate and transform place and community by flood. Once constructed it is the nightmare possibility of technological failure causing dams to break, bridges to collapse, and in modern times, nuclear catastrophe to inundate power stations; all of them, visions of mega-death by water.

Death by water on a grand scale also holds unique, mythic terrors evoking memories of biblical and classical catastrophe of Noah’s Ark, Atlantis, Santorini, 119 and other flood myths in world religions, explored in the anthropology of Sir James Frazer. 120 Sunken villages also represent a variation of the aesthetic Rose Macaulay: once called “the pleasure of ruins,” 121 a gothic disposition that is turbo-charged under water as townscapes mutate into submerged wastelands of “mildewed crosses, lonely spires, barely-visible stone foundations, and rusting bed frames.” 122 More than any kind of dark tourism, sunken villages come closest to delivering encounters with the uncanny in its most quintessential guise, as haunted landscapes of spectral reappearance and the returning undead. This revenant fantasy seems close to reality during hot summers when the waters of lakes and reservoirs shrink and what once was, reappears as what is. Such special effects happen intermittently at a number of sunken villages. At Vilarinho Da Furnas, flooded by the Portuguese Electricity Company, part of the village reappears in autumn and winter, and there is a nearby museum to tell the story. 123 At Kalyazin, in Russia, church steeples rise above the waves and bells, lost below the water, are rumored to ring out again. 124 In St. Thomas, Nevada, certain buildings remained visible which now include houses, a square, and a cemetery. 125 In Flagstaff, Arizona, a historical society archives and exhibits memorials to the sinking in 1949. 126

Llandwddyn’s first reappearance was in 1933, the year the Loch Ness Monster made news. Today visitors to Lake Vyrnwy do not have to wait for hot summers for the revenant experience. It can be imagined in viewing the engine house at the edge of the lake, which was built to look like a medieval, Bavarian tower. It is there all the year round and on a grey day, seen through enveloping mist, it resembles the spectral castle in Grimm’s Norse Mythology that sank under the waters. A photograph of the view is on sale at the hotel.

Dark Tourism History: Making the Dead Work for the Living

Encounters with forms of “engineered and orchestrated remembrance”—seen here as the defining features of dark tourism—have existed throughout history, and are ones that everyone has incidentally engaged in from time to time. The sepulchral features they comprise only became a prime consideration set in traveling and recreational tastes and practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was because of social and ideological factors which included: the aftermath of pilgrimage, the growth of antiquarian tastes, and the many, revolutionary effects of Romanticism—particularly the discursive coding of landscape as travel spectacle with sublime and gothic, as well as picturesque, features. Romanticism and cemetery development also valorized the celebration and acting out of elegiac displays of sentiment at memorials and grave sides, encouraged in guidebooks, which became part of an aestheticized cult of “beautiful death” for which the Victorians became famous. 127 The recency of dark tourism as a named recreational form is why there have been, and continue to be, academic debates over its meaning, temporal origins (traditional, modern, or postmodern?), and its position in relation to other disciplines and travel concepts (heritage studies, human geography, the history of pilgrimage, etc.). A less-parochial issue is where its history is leading. In the past dark tourism has been mainly situated and studied as an agenda in the private sphere: the world of lifestyle, personal taste, and recreational choice. This may be changing. In the new millennium there are winds of ideological change, drawing it into a more public and controversial arena, that of “the politics of commemoration,” 128 a movement that began in academia in the 1990s as critical, postcolonial history, and has since gone viral in news agendas internationally. It has stimulated organized protests involving direct action at sites commemorating colonial figures and events through demonstrations, vandalism of memorials, and attempts to remove statues. Dark tourism has been, and will be, unavoidably affected, since its central activity is travel to view engineered and orchestrated remembrance that includes many such sites.” 129

The consequences may be two-fold. One is mounting threats to specific sites that may require protection, a contingency the English Parliament recognized in February 2021 in preparing a law making the taking down of monuments illegal without planning permission. The second may be the growth of a more informed, dark tourist, whose gaze is turned on those commemorated, but equally directed to the pragmatics of commemorative choices: who is commemorated and who might have been, but is not, and the features of their memorials (forms, events, number, siting, scale, etc.).

The sunken village material represents continuing research that dramatizes issues about the evolution of “engineered and orchestrated remembrance” as dark tourism’s “trademark” feature. Unlike death and the dead, previously assumed to be the visitor encounters in dark tourism, remembrance has no closure. It is always susceptible to change by the living. Over time remembrance of Llanwddyn went from being a traditional, rural village with a history published by the local vicar a decade before to obliteration and metamorphosis as a dam development. 130 It was then commemorated at different times as a necessity in regional water supply; a monument to British engineering; an elite sporting lodge and luxury hotel; and an intermittent, dark tourism phenomenon. The rediscovery of the photographic album offers a striking discursive text to add to those in circulation as supporting this emerging interest in sunken locations.

The case illustrates how what people and events are remembered at commemorative sites over time, reflect the interests, power, and resources of the living. It is they who metaphorically ventriloquize the form and content of memorial messages, through which the dead seem to speak. Sunken villages are new as collective, dark tourism locations. They may, however, be seen as a subset of a larger and neglected domain of spaces in the “politics of commemoration,” that of industrial devastation and fatality which for two centuries has included mining disasters, losses at sea, toxic factory conditions, transport accidents, and catastrophes of industrial pollution affecting human communities and natural habitats. These and associated effects of climate change, may in the future become more explicit agendas in dark tourism visits, not just as sights to see, but as lessons that stimulate reflection and engagement.

Further Reading

Curl, James Stevens.   The Victorian Celebration of Death . Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1980 .

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Curl, James Stevens.   A Celebration of Death . London: Batsford, 1981 .

Dann, Graham. M. S. , and Seaton, A. V. ( 2001 ): Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism . New York: Haworth Hospitality Press.

Hooper, G. , and J. J. Lennon . Dark Tourism: Practice and Interpretation . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2018 .

Lennon, J. J. , and M. Foley . Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster . London: Continuum, 2000 .

Lloyd, D.   Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia, 1919–1939 . Oxford: Berg, 1998 .

Macaulay, Rose.   The Pleasure of Ruins , 2nd ed. Thames and Hudson, 1964 .

Seaton, A. V. “ Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism. ” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 ( 1996 ): 234–244.

Seaton A. V. “ Thanatourism at Waterloo. ” Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 1 ( 1997 ): 130–158.

Seaton, Tony. “Cultivated Pursuits: Cultural tourism as Metempsychosis and Metensomatosis,” in Routledge Handbook of Cultural Tourism , ed. Melanie Smith and Greg Richards . London: Routledge, 2013 , 19–27.

Sharpley, R. and P. R. Stone (eds.), The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism . Bristol: Channel View, 2009 , 23–38.

Stone, P. P. , Hartmann, R. , Seaton, A.V. , Sharpley, R. and L. White (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies . London: MacMillan, 2018 , 377–507

Wolffe, John.   Great Deaths Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain . London: The British Academy, 2000 .

1   Jafar Jafari   Encyclopaedia of Tourism : 578. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)

2   International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (1996): 578. This is the issue that introduced dark tourism and proposed the two the main approaches; J. J. Lennon , and M. Foley , Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000).

3   A. V. Seaton , and J. Lennon , “Thanatourism in the Early 21st Century: Moral Panics, Ulterior Motives and Alterior Desires,” in New Horizons in Tourism: Strange Experiences and Stranger Practices , ed. T. V. Singh (Oxford: CABI Publishing, 2004), 64–68.

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  Lennon, Foley, Dark Tourism , 3.

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  Seaton, “Guided by the Dark,” 234–244.

10 M emento mori aids comprised a variety of literary and artistic texts, and artifacts that were read, worn, kept at hand, and studied including death’s head rings, desk-top skulls and other emblems of death. A major literary and artistic convention promoting memento mori reflections was the “Dance of Death,” a parade of people from all walks of life being led away to their doom by Death, a skeletal figure dancing ahead of them which was featured in books, drama, and dances. Ars Moriendi were Catholic texts on how to face and endure dying. The classic study of the genre is by Mary Catharine O’Connor , The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). An account of the Ars Moriendi in England is by Nancy Lee Beaty , The Craft of Dying The Tradition of the Ars Moriendi in England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970).

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  Raine, “A Dark Tourism Spectrum.”

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  Seaton, ”Guided by the Dark,” 243.

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43   Edward Said , Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1978, 1995) ; Edward Said , Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993) ; Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1992) ; Homi Bhabba , The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

44   Nataliya Danilova , The Politics of War Commemoration in the UK and Russia (London: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2015) ; A. Erll, A. and A. Nunning (eds.), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008) ; B. Graham and P. Howard (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (Aldergate: Ashgate, 2007) ; A. King , Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) ; D. Viejo-Rose , “Memorial Functions: Intent, Impact and the Right to Remember,” Memory Studies 4, no. 4 (2011): 465–480 ; Craig Wight “Contested National Tragedies: An Ethical Dimension,” in The Darker Side of Travel , eds. Sharpley and Stone , 129–144 ; C. A. Wight , and J. Lennon , “Selective Interpretation and Eclectic Human Heritage in Lithuania,” Tourism Management 28, no. 2 (2007): 234–254 ; Paul Williams , Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford: Berg, 2007).

45   Ludwig Wittgenstein , Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1922). In this famous and formidable treatise on language, logic, and meaning, Wittgenstein started with disarmingly, simple phrases to engage the reader in pursuing a revolutionary track of complex, theoretical dissidence that was argued in several hundred axioms and assertions. The aim of the “Tractatus” was to demonstrate how the meaning of language was anchored in basic and underlying social contexts, not just a matter of formal, linguistic logic. “State of affairs” and, “that which is the case” were two of the phrases he used to contrast what he saw as the reality of language in actual use , compared to its status as grammatical and syntactical logic. The real “state of affairs” in dark tourism, it is here argued, is “remembrance” as the focal issue, not “death” as previously supposed. “Engineered remembrance” is the actual “state of affairs” confronting both dark tourism consumers and suppliers. “Remembrance” in material form, not “death,” is “that which is the case”—the de facto object of “the tourist gaze.”

46   Tony Seaton , “Patrimony, Engineered Remembrance and Ancestral Vampires: Appraising Thanatouristic Resources in Ireland and Italy,” in Hooper Lennon , Dark Tourism , 55–68 ; A. V. Seaton , “Encountering Engineered and Orchestrated Remembrance: A Situational Model of Dark Tourism and Its History,” in P. Stone et al., The Palgrave Handbook , 9–33.

47   John and Elizabeth Romer . The Seven Wonders of the World (London: Michael O’Mara Books Limited, 1995).

48   Jeremy Black , The British and the Grand Tour (London: Routledge, 1985) ; Edward Chaney , The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance (London: Frank Cass, 1998) ; John Towner , An Historical Geography of Recreation and Tourism in the Western World 1540–1940 (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1996) ; A. V. Seaton , in Keywords for Travel Writing Studies , eds. C. Fosdick , C. , Z. Kinsley , Z and K. Walchester (2019), 108–110.

49   A. V. Seaton , in Keywords for Travel Writing Studies , eds. C. Fosdick , C. , Z. Kinsley , Z and K. Walchester (2019), 108–110.

50   Paul Koudounaris , The Empire of Death. A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011).

51   R. Fraser Rae , The Business of Travel: A Fifty Year’s Record of Progress (London: Thomas Cook and Son, 1891) ; John Pudney , The Thomas Cook Story (London: Michael Joseph, 1953) ; Piers Brendon , Thomas Cook’s 150 years of Popular Tourism (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1992).

52   Paul Westover , Necroromanticism: Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

53   William Howittt , Homes and Haunts of English Poets , 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1847).

54   William Howitt , Visits to Remarkable Places: Old Halls, Battlefields etc. , 2 vols. (London: Longman, Orme, Green Brown and Longmans, 1840).

55   S. Carter Hall , Pilgrimages to English Shrines , vol 2 (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue and Co., 1853), 154.

56   Joan Evans , A History of the Society of Antiquaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 1–60.

Jonathan Skinner “The Smoke of an Eruption and the Dust of an Earthquake: Dark Tourism, the Sublime, and the Reanimation of the Disaster Location,” in Stone et al., 125–150.

Two of the sites that suffered most from take-away memento seekers were Shakespeare’s Stratford, and the Catacombs at Rome.

59   John Howes Gleason , The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain 22 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 22.

For Scottish lore and legend see, Walter Scott’s works which were intended to sell Caledonia to the world. His “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border Consisting of Historical and Romantic Ballads,” first published in 1802 in 2 vols. in Kelso by James Ballantyne, was reprinted throughout the century. It abounds in battles, blood, and thunder.

Jaunting-cart in Ireland, camel rides during Holy Land tours, and pony trekking through Iceland, a land with few roads and no railways.

62 “The March of Intellect” was an ironical, journalistic name for the growth in popular reading in the 1830s brought about by technological advances in the speed and volume of printing, and reduced cost of publishing, Entrepreneurs like Charles Knight exploited these to democratize reading by publishing cheap editions of classic works, including Shakespeare’s works, and a “Penny Encyclopaedia” issued in weekly parts. The name was seized upon by graphic satirists like Robert Seymour and George Cruikshank who depicted dustmen reading books, cockneys discussing philosophy and politics. In London their caricatures were hung in shop windows, for the middle classes they were bought as single items or sets, but also hired in scrap books of caricatures lent out for dinner parties and chic weekend entertainment. Graphic satire offers the major artistic record of tourism taste in the 19th century; Tony Seaton , “The Tourist Experience in Graphic Satire 1796-1914”in Tijana Rakic , and Jo-Anne Lester , Travel, Tourism and Art: 13–34 .

63 There is abundant contemporary and modern literature on the Gothic. A classic, often revised, is Kenneth Clark , The Gothic Revival: Essays in the History of Taste (London: John Murray, 1928, rev. 1950 and 1962). Michael Charlesworth has edited a substantial compilation of extracts from Gothic texts: The Gothic revival 1720–1870 , 3 vols. (Robertsbridge, East SussexHelm Information, 2002). Britton’s life and career are described in his neglected, two-volume autobiography which includes a catalogue of his topographical works, as well as interesting contextual material relevant to dark tourism’s expansion on landscape, ecclesiastical illustration, and commercial engraving. John Britton , The Auto-Biography of John Britton , 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, 1850).

64 For Gray’s life, see Robert L. Mack , Thomas Gray: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

65   Ronald Fletcher , In a Country Churchyard (Batsford, London, 1976).

66   Ian Ousby , The Englishman’s England. Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 387–388.

67   William Wordsworth , “Upon Epitaphs,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth , ed. Alexander Grosart , vol. 3 (London: Edward Moxon, 1876), 25–75.

68   Montague Summers , A Gothic Bibliography (London: Fortune Press, n.d. [1940]).

69 The gothic has attracted exhibitions and an enormous and continuing literature since its appearance in the late eighteenth century. It was one of the first cultural developments to be named as an influence in Dark Tourism/Thanatourism ( Seaton. op. cit. 1996 : 237–238). Its history may be pleasurably sampled in many, modern illustrated studies including: Richard Davenport-Hines , Gothic Four hundred years of excess, horror, evil and ruin (London: Fourth Estate 1998) ; and, Terror and Wonder. The Gothic Imagination which accompanied a major exhibition at the British Library in 2015 London: British Library 2014).

70   Constantin Volney , Les Ruines ou Meditations sur les Revolutions des Empires (Paris. Translated into English 1802. [publisher?]

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the sonnet “Ozymandias” in 1817. It was first included in volume 3 of his collected, poetical works, chosen and edited in four volumes in 1839 by his wife Mary, the author of Frankenstein .

72 Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was first published in an edition of 500 in 1757. It was quickly translated into other languages, achieving European influence. The best critical edition is by J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958). Earlier in the century the Sublime had attracted a book length study published anonymously in London with no publisher “A Treatise on the Sublime … Translated from the Greek of Longinus with Critical Reflections, Remarks and Observations, by M. Boileau, M. Dacier, and M. Boivin” (1712). Samuel H. Monk , The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1935) ; Richard John Hipple , The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957) ; Marjorie Hope Nicolson , Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1959). A recent selection of short readings on aspects of the Sublime is by Cian Duffy and Peter Howell , Cultures of the Sublime: Selected Readings 1750–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).

73   G. A. Walker , Gatherings from Graveyards (London: Longman and Company, 1830).

74   Report from the Select Committee of Improvement of the Health of Towns … Effect of Internment of Bodies in Town (London: The House of Commons, 1842).

75   Edwin Chadwick , Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Internment in Towns (London: C. Clowes and Sons, 1843).

76 Pere La Chaise; Michel Dansel , Au Pere-Lachaise. Son histoires, ses secrets, ses promenades . (Nancy: Fayard, 1972) ; George Blair , Biographic and Descriptive Sketches of Glasgow Necropoli s (Glasgow: Ogle and Son,1857). For Sweden and Liverpool, see James Stevens Curl   A Celebration of Death : 151–154 and 206–210 (London: Batsford, 1981).

77   J.C. Loudon ,. On the Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries and on the Improvements of Churchyards (London: Printed for the author, and sold by Longmans, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1843, 1981).

78 Since the 1970s James Stevens Curl has been a notable and continuing campaigner on behalf of historic cemeteries. His two most important book-length, general studies have been A Celebration of Death (New York: Scribners, 1980). The Victorian Celebration of Death (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000)

79 Curl’s works on specific cemeteries have included: “Nunhead Cemetery, London,” Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society 1980: 14–22 , 1980; “Northern Cemetery under Threat: Jesmond, Newcastle on Tyne,” Country Life , June 12, 1981: 68–69 [pages]; Kensal Green Cemetery: The Origins and Development of the General Cemetery of All Souls, Kensal Green, London, 1824 – 2001 (London: Phillimore, 2001). An extensive bibliography of Curl’s pioneering studies on cemeteries and funerary culture can be found at, http://www.jamesstevenscurl.com/james-stevens-curl-complete-works , accessed 18.6.22

80 The Association of Significant Cemeteries in Europe was inaugurated in Bologna in 2001. It quickly attracted 59 members, which grew to 130 in 99 countries by 2015, and numbered over 200 in 2020. See Mauro Felicori and Annalisa Zanotti, “Cemeteries of Europe: A Historical Heritage to Appreciate and Restore”; Tony Seaton , “Last Resting Places? Recreational Spaces? or Thanatourism Attractions? The Future of Historic Cemeteries and Churchyards in Europe” in Landscapes of Leisure: Space, Place and Identities , eds. Sean Gammon and Sam Elkington (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 71–95.

81 Anonymous, Herveiana (Scarborough: John Cole, 1823), 114–115.

82   William Andrews , Curious Epitaphs (London: Hamilton, Adams and Company, 1883).

  The Society for Preserving Memorials of the Dead, published from 1883 to 1885.

84   James Smillie , Green-wood Illustrated … with Descriptive Notices by Nehemiah Cleaveland (New York: Robert Martin, 1847) ; Mount Auburn Illustrated …with Descriptive Notices by Cornelia W. Walter ” (New York: Martin and Johnson, (n.d. [c. 1850]).

85   John Townshend , Sepulchral Literature: A Catalogue of Some Books Relating to the Disposal of the Bodies and Perpetuating the Memories of the Dead (New York, 1887)

86   John Edmondson , Death and Tourist : Dark Encounters in Mid-Nineteenth Century London via the Paris Morgue , in,, Stone et al., 2018, op. cit., 77–102.

87   Paul Westover , Necromanticism Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan).

88   A.V. Seaton , “War and Thanatourism: Waterloo 1815–1914,” Annals of Tourism Research , 26, No 1 (1999): 130–158.

89   Stony Seaton and Graham M. S. “Dann, “Crime and Dark Tourism: The Carnivalesque Spectacles of the English Judicial System,” in, Stone 2018, op. cit. 33–76

90   John Wolffe , Great Deaths Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (London: British Academy, 2000).

91   E. Pierce , A Concise Biographical Memoir of George III … also an Account of his Lying in State at Windsor; the Procession and other Solemnities observed at the Royal Funeral (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1820).

  Wolffe, Great Deaths , 44–45.

  Wolffe, Great Deaths .

94   Lord Edward Gleichan , London’s Open-Air Statuary (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), xv ; Arthur Byron , London Statues: A Guide to London’s Outdoor Statues and Sculpture (London: Constable, 1928)

95   London County Council, Indications of Houses of Historical Interest in London , 6 vols. (London: London County Council, 1901–1930).

96 Memorials of the two World Wars have been well documented. They include Sydney Hurst, The Silent Cities: An Illustrated Guide to the War Cemeteries and memorials to the “Missing” in France and Flanders: 1914–1918 (London: Methuen, 1929, 1933) ; Philip Longworth , The Unending Vigil: A History of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission 1917–1967 (London: Constable, 1967) ; Trefor Jones , On Fame’s Eternal Camping Ground: A study of First World War Epitaphs in the British Cemeteries of the Western Front (Pinner: T. G. Jones, 2007) ; Gaynor Kavanagh , Museums and the First World War: A Social History (London: Leicester University Press, 1994) ; David Saunders , Britain’s Maritime Memorials and Mementoes (Sparkford: Haynes Publishing, 1996) ; David and Betty Beaty   Light Perpetual: Aviators’ Memorial Windows (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1995).

97   Robert Hewison , The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987).

98   Patrick Wright , On Living in an Old Country: National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso Books, 1986).

99   The Guardian (2019): “Disaster tourism arrives in Whaley Bridge after dam incident,” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/09/disaster-tourism-arrives-in-whaley-bridge-after-dam , accessed July 28, 2020.

100   Rowlands, D. W. L. , History and Description of Llanwyddn and Lake Vyrnwy (Llanwyddn Parochial Church Council: Llanwddyn Parochial Church Council: Welshpool Printing Company, 1974), 12–15.

101 The Council kept a record of the development in a large album of photographs from which the four illustrations here are taken. One of the technical site visitors was G.F. Deacon a leading authority on water supply engineering who later praised it, See, G. F. Deacon , “Vyrnwy,” Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers , Vol cx1: 111–113, July; 1892. The dam was also described in a standard reference work on water supply which featured Vyrnwy as the photographic frontispiece, see W.K. Burton , (1898): “The Water Supply of Towns and the Construction of Waterworks” (London: Crosby Lockwood and Son, 1898): 76–78.

102   John Baynes , George Westropp George , and Simon Baynes , Lake Vyrnwy The Story of a Sporting Hotel (Shrewsbury: Quiller, 2019), 3–13.

Newspaper accounts and stories passed down to current residents have been identified, but the COVID crisis of 2020 and 2021 has delayed recording and analysis, planned for late 2021.

104   J. J. Lennon , “Dark Tourism Visualisation: Some Reflections on the Role of Photography,” in Stone et al, The Palgrave Handbook , 585–603.

105 The best-known graphic records of railway constructions are the lithographs of John Bourne , Drawings of the London and Birmingham Railway (London: Ackermann and Co. and C. Tilt, 1839) ; John Bourne , The History and description of the Great Western Railway (London: David Bogue, 1846).

108   Capel Celyn , “The Drowning of Capel Celyn,” Medium.com (1963), https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/the-drowning-of-capel-celyn-109496dc611e ; and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ui2rFSP6AM , both accessed March 11, 2020.

109   WebUrbanist, “Drowned Towns,” WebUrbanist (2014) https://weburbanist.com/2014/03/10/drowned-towns-10-underwater-ghost-cities-buildings/2/ , accessed May 12, 2022.

110   Bess Lovejoy , “Ten Drowned Cities You Can Visit,” Mental Floss , 2015, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/66680/10-drowned-towns-you-can-visit , accessed December 30, 2020.

111   “The Ruins of Villa Epecuan,” The Atlantic , 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2011/07/the-ruins-of-villa-epecuen/100110/ .

Si Cheng (2014): “China’s Atlantis of the East.” Si Cheng was flooded in 1959 to make way for Qiandao lake (also known as Thousand Island lake) for the Xin’an River Dam project. Nearly 300,000 people had to relocate, some of whom had families that had lived in the area for centuries; http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20140711-chinas-atlantis-of-the-east , accessed June 8, 2022.

Potosi in Venezuela was flooded in 1985 but over the next thirty years the church spire has gradually emerged from beneath the waters; https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/drowned-church-potosi , accessed June 6, 2022.

Port Royal in Jamaica was a “sunken pirate city” that disappeared in the 1690s due to a natural disaster. Today most of the remains of the 17th century city lie under up to 40 feet of water. In 1969, Edwin Link discovered the most famous artifact: a pocket watch dated 1686, stopped at exactly 11:43; https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/sunken-pirate-stronghold-at-port-royal , accessed June 4, 2022.

115 “ “Flooded Towns of America,” Wikipedia, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flooded_towns_in_the_United_States ; Pinterest https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/347621664966005596/ , accessed January 21, 2021.

116   “Lost Villages of the St. Lawrence River, Canada’s Atlantis,” Global News , 2018, https://globalnews.ca/news/4369620/lost-villages-of-the-st-lawrence-river-canadas-atlantis/ , accessed January 1, 2021.

117   “Airtours,” Ar-Tour.com , http://ar-tour.com/guides/stories-of-submerged-towns-1/the-lost-villages.aspx .

Santorini was an earthquake disaster site in the past that has produced floods and sunamis. See, Jonathan Skinner, “The Smoke of an Eruption and the Dust of an Earthquake. Dark Tourism, the Sublime, and the Reanimation of the Disaster Location” in, Stone et al., op. cit. 2018 : 125–150. In the present Santorini offers tourists the double appeal of earthquakes and inundations as day tours. https://www.viator.com/tours/Santorini/Volcano-and-Hot-Springs-Tour/d959-156401P1 , accessed June 3, 2022.

120 Floods received brief mentions in James Frazer’s twelve-volume study of myths and superstitions, The Golden Bough (1890–1915), and extended treatment later in, James Frazer , Folk-lore in the Old Testament. Studies in Comparative Religion Legend and Law, vol. 3 (London: Macmillan, 1919).

121   Rose Macaulay , The Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953).

  http://www.weburbanist.com/2014/03/10/ , accessed January 30, 2021.

Vilarinho Da Furnas Portugal had origins going back 2,000 years. It was flooded by the Portuguese Electricity Company in 1972. Parts reappear in Autumn and Winter. The Museum was opened in 1981; www.atlasobscura.com/places/vilarinho-da-fuma/ , accessed January 30, 2021.

Stalin ordered the flooding of Kalyazin in 1939 to build Uglich Reservoir. Submerged buildings have reappeared and Christian Services still take place inside the Tower; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uglich_Reservoir , accessed January 17, 2021.

St Thomas, Monument City, Nevada, was flooded in 1985 in creation of the Hoover Dam, leaving only the church steeple visible. In 2008 many houses, a square, and a cemetery reappeared; https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/indiana/underwater-ghost-town-in/ , accessed January 16, 2021.

Flagstaff was flooded in 1949 in the construction of the Long Falls Dam; https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/maine/underwater-city-me/ , accessed January 16, 2021. The Dead River Historical Society Museum includes a memorial exhibit to the “lost” towns of Flagstaff Village and Dead River Plantation; https://sites.google.com/site/deadriverareahistory/home/the-flooding-of-flagstaff/ , accessed January 16, 2021.

127 The sentimentalized aesthetics surrounding dying and funerary practices have been the subject of many studies, including those by James Curll,   The Victorian Celebration of Death (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1980) and A Celebration of Death (London: Batsford, 1981) ; John Morley , Death, Heaven and the Victorians (London: Studio Vista, 1971) ; and in David Robinson , and Dean Koontz , Beautiful Death. Art of the Cemetery (London: Studio Vista, 1996).

128 “Politics of commemoration,” and the related areas of “Politics of History” and “Politics of Remembrance,” have been widely debated by historians and social scientists since the Millennium. See six national examples at “Politics of Memory,” Wikipedia , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_memory ; and Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield , Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001).

129 For discussion of modern dark tourism and the politics of remembrance see, Tony Seaton , “Remembrancing, Remembrance Gangs, and Co-opted Encounters: Loading and Reloading Dark Tourism Experiences,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Tourist Experience , ed. Richard Sharpley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022).

130   Thomas Henry , “History of the Parish of Llanwddyn,” Montgomeryshire: Collections Historical and Archaeological (Vol 4, 1873): 391–406.

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Τι είναι το dark tourism και πώς η Ελλάδα θα καταστεί “σκοτεινός” τουριστικός προορισμός

• 18/01/2023, 14:50

Στον σκοτεινό τουρισμό , ο οποίος βασίζεται στην επίσκεψη σημείων που έχουν συνδεθεί με αρνητικά γεγονότα και θάνατο , στρέφονται ολοένα και περισσότεροι τουρίστες διεθνώς προκειμένου να βιώσουν εμπειρίες που τους βγάζουν έξω από τη ζώνη ασφαλείας που έχουν συνηθίσει στην καθημερινότητά τους.

Με δεδομένο ότι αυτή τη στιγμή η παγκόσμια τουριστική βιομηχανία ανέρχεται σε 30 δισεκατομμύρια δολάρια , ποσό το οποίο αναμένεται να αυξηθεί κατά 8 δις το διάστημα 2030 – 2032, και οι λάτρεις του “σκοτεινού” τουρισμού αποτελούν το 2%, αντιλαμβάνεται κανείς τις προοπτικές ανάπτυξης που υπάρχουν. Αν νομίζετε ότι είναι κάτι φρέσκο που μόλις πρόσφατα έκανε την εμφάνισή του στην αγορά, καλύτερα να αναθεωρήσετε τις αρχικές σας σκέψεις μιας και δεν συνιστά νέα τάση, αλλά αποτελεί μία σύγχρονη μορφή αναδυόμενης τουριστικής δραστηριότητας.

Όπως αναφέρει στο Fortune η Ιωάννα Μυταφτσή , Υποψήφια Διδάκτωρ Ειδικών Μορφών Τουρισμού στο Αριστοτέλειο Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλονίκης και Συντονίστρια Θεματικής Ενότητας, Ειδικών Μορφών Τουρισμού στην Γραμματεία Παραγωγικού Τομέα της Νέας Δημοκρατίας, κάνοντας μια ιστορική αναδρομή θα δούμε ότι πάντα υπήρχε η τάση του ταξιδιού που σε φέρνει αντιμέτωπο με τον θάνατο του άλλου. Τρανό παράδειγμα είναι, όπως επισημαίνει, το Κολοσσαίο ή η επίσκεψη τόπων  που στο παρελθόν έχουν πραγματοποιηθεί δημόσιες εκτελέσεις.

Προσθέτει πως ο σκοτεινός τουρισμός τα τελευταία 25 – 30 χρόνια έχει αποκτήσει οργανωμένη μορφή , κυρίως λόγω της έρευνας που εκπονεί η ακαδημαϊκή κοινότητα και των εκτενών αφιερωμάτων που φιλοξενούνται σε επιστημονικά περιοδικά.

«Η ζήτηση για τον dark tourism αυξάνεται αλλά ακόμα δεν είναι ευρέως γνωστός στην Ελλάδα . Θα έλεγα, ωστόσο, ότι υπάρχουν τεράστιες προοπτικές ανάπτυξης του στην Ελλάδα, η οποία ως χώρα διαθέτει την πλούσια ιστορική πολιτιστική κληρονομιά από δύο Παγκόσμιους Πολέμους. Με το σωστό branding και marketing , την ανάπτυξη τουριστικών σκοτεινών εμπειριών, καθώς επίσης και τη δημιουργία των κατάλληλων υποδομών, η Ελλάδα θα μπορέσει να καταστεί σκοτεινός τουριστικός προορισμός» λέει χαρακτηριστικά η κα Μυταυτσή.

Ως επισκέψιμοι τόποι που θα μπορούσαν να συμπεριληφθούν στη λίστα για σκοτεινό τουρισμό είναι το σημείο δολοφονίας του Καποδίστρια , η Σπιναλόγκα , τα νησιά εξορίας Μακρόνησος – Γυάρος ακόμη και το Πολυτεχνείο , θα μπορούσε μελλοντικά να καταστεί σκοτεινός τουριστικός προορισμός. Όσο για την πόλη που έχει βαθιά σκοτεινή ιστορία αυτή είναι, σύμφωνα με την κα Μυταυτσή, η Θεσσαλονίκη.

«Η μεγαλύτερη φοβία για τους τουρίστες δεν είναι ο πόλεμος, αλλά το κόστος διαβίωσης»

« Το απόκοσμο και ο θάνατος προσελκύουν το ενδιαφέρον και προσδίδουν εμπειρία διότι η συναισθηματική φόρτιση, η θλίψη, ο πόνος, ακόμη και ο κίνδυνος είναι στοιχεία που ελκύουν τον άνθρωπο . Άλλωστε ο σύγχρονος τουρίστας δεν αρκείται στα συνηθισμένα καταναλωτικά τουριστικά προϊόντα. Αναζητά την εμπειρία εκείνη που θα του αλλάξει τη ζωή ή θα αποτελέσει μία πολύτιμη προσθήκη σε αυτή».

Καταλήγει λέγοντας πως τα κίνητρα που ωθούν τον ταξιδιώτη να προσφύγει σε αυτή την εναλλακτική μορφή τουρισμού είναι πολλά, ποικίλα και πολυδιάστατα το βασικότερο ωστόσο είναι η μνήμη . Ακολουθούν η περιέργεια, το ενδιαφέρον για την ιστορία, εκπαιδευτικοί λόγοι, η συμφιλίωση με την θνησιμότητα, αλλά και το προσκύνημα δικών μας ανθρώπων που χάθηκαν σε συγκεκριμένα σημεία.

ΔΙΑΒΑΣΤΕ ΠΕΡΙΣΣΟΤΕΡΕΣ ΕΙΔΗΣΕΙΣ:

• Η Ελλάδα στην κορυφή της προτίμησης των Αυστριακών τουριστών
• Ποιο ελληνικό νησί βρίσκεται στους 10 κορυφαίους προορισμούς του 2023

17 Must-Visit Dark Tourism Destinations Around the World

Dark Tourism destinations were once the remit of a select group of travellers. However, after the launch of popular Netflix show Dark Tourist, these attractions have hit the mainstream. 

If you’re interested in the morbid and the macabre, look no further. After making several visits to dark history sites myself, I’ve teamed up with other travellers to bring you this list of dark tourism destinations all around the world. 

Read more: (opens in new tab)

• What is Dark Tourism?
• Are Bolivia’s Mine Tours Ethical?
• Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Photographic Guide

17 Must-Visit Dark Tourism Destinations

1. chernobyl exclusion zone – kyiv, ukraine.

The abandoned amusement park in Pripyat is one of dark tourism’s crowning images. The haunting stills of the fairground that never heard the laughs of children hang in modern consciousness, a symbol of tragic loss and a warning of the mistakes men can make. 

In 1986, the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant exploded, causing the worst nuclear accident in the world’s history. The effects were huge; people were forced to evacuate their homes and the surrounding areas became a hotbed of radiation. It was predicted that never again in our lifetime, would Chernobyl be inhabited by anything living. 

Surprisingly, the Chernobyl exclusion zone has recovered quicker than was ever predicted. Although there are still risks with spending long periods in the exclusion zone, wild animals have returned and are thriving. Despite its recovery, Chernobyl acts as a very sobering reminder of the damage humanity can do without intention.

2. Sucre Cemetery – Sucre, Bolivia

Sucre Cemetery is an unlikely attraction in Bolivia’s capital. Regularly appearing on tourist maps, it is a peaceful place which attracts visitors who come to see how the Bolivians handle death and all that comes after. 

Also frequently visited by locals, this cemetery is a surprisingly popular spot for catching up with friends, studying and paying homage to the dearly departed. 

Unlike other cemeteries I’d visited, these graves were arranged in a block system above ground. The vast majority of these were carefully maintained and were regularly stocked with gifts for departed loved ones. Small bottles of spirits were a common appearance, alongside slices of cake!

In Bolivia, death is accepted as an inevitability of life. While graveyards ultimately provide a space for burial, they hold a far more important symbolic role in Bolivian culture. Although death is traditionally seen as a dividing force, Sucre Cemetery demonstrates that death can continue to unite us all, long after somebody is gone. 

3. The Poison Garden – Alnwick, England

Home to around 100 toxic and narcotic plants, the Poison Garden is undoubtedly one of the best things to do in Alnwick . This small but deadly garden is home to some of the world’s most dangerous plants and visitors are only allowed to enter on a guided tour. 

Deadly nightshade, cannabis and coca (the plant from which cocaine is derived) are a few examples of the plants housed in the Poison Garden. Visitors are prohibited from touching any of the greenery and there have even been cases of people passing out after smelling the plants!

The tour guides at the Poison Garden are great at explaining the real-life application of the plants using case studies such as Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) and Graham Young (The Teacup Poisoner). The garden also runs tours for local school children, educating them about drug use. 

4. Paneriai Massacre Site – Vilnius, Lithuania

Paneriai is one of Vilnius’ many neighbourhoods. However, it will be forever remembered as the Ponary massacre site. The Einsatzgruppen (Nazi death squads) rounded up groups of Jews from the Vilna Ghetto, took them to Paneriai, executed them and forced other Jewish prisoners to dig mass graves and bury them.

There are six burial sites within the complex, each the site of multiple mass executions. Because so many sets of bodies are stacked on each other, it is impossible to know the exact number of deaths. It is estimated to be around 100,000.

Those brought to Paneriai were burned to death in an attempt to destroy evidence. They were then shovelled into the pits, which today are marked by memorials. Like many of the massacre sites in the Baltics, Paneriai is a forested area. This makes walking around a surreal experience as it is quiet, peaceful and beautiful, a stark contrast to the memorials reminding you that thousands of people were slaughtered there.

Contributed by Cultura Obscura . Follow them on Facebook !

5. St. Nicholas’ Church – Hamburg, Germany

In July 1943, Hamburg was the target of an allied aerial World War Two bombing. The tall spire of St. Nicholas’ Church was used as an orientation marker and the building was almost completely destroyed. All that remained were some external walls, the crypt and most of the tower.

Today, St. Nicholas’ Church stands as a memorial to the victims of WWII. The memorial exhibits in the crypt provide many details of the events leading up to Operation Gomorrah , the air war over Europe. Beautiful sculptures sit inside, illustrating the futility of war and its disastrous consequences. A 51-bell carillon has been installed in the tower and sounds every Thursday at noon.

We visited the church on a walking tour of Hamburg and the experience still haunts me. The vast majority of people in Hamburg during Operation Gomorrah would have been perfectly ordinary citizens going about their daily lives – people just like me.

Contributed by Lesley of Freedom 56 Travel . Follow her on Twitter !

6. Comuna 13 – Medellin, Colombia

Medellin was once the most dangerous city in the world. When infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar controlled the city, crime was extremely high and the locals lived in fear. The neighbourhood of Comuna 13 had direct access to the main highway, making the exportation of drugs, weapons and other illegal goods extremely easy. 

Drug cartels fought over control of the area and as a result, Comuna 13 was a very dangerous place. It was not uncommon to hear gunshots throughout the day and even to see dead bodies piled on the street. With that in mind, it might come as a surprise that Comuna 13 is now one of the most visited neighbourhoods in Medellin. 

Over recent years, a tremendous amount of money has been invested in Comuna 13. A cable car system was installed to link it to the city centre. The resulting increase in tourism has sparked real change for the locals and the neighbourhood has become one of the country’s leading creative hubs.

Contributed by LivingOutLau . Follow him on Instagram ! 

7. Gulag Labour Camps – Karaganda, Kazakhstan

My trip to Kazakhstan left a deep impression on me. While I had heard about the so-called gulags, I did not know that most of them were in Kazakhstan. Stalin deported whole ethnic groups to the remotest corners of the country. This is how during WWII, the Volga Germans ended up in Karaganda .

Stalin wanted to develop the farms and coal mines in Karaganda and set up a network of labour camps to support these projects. Political prisoners and deportees provided the free labour that was necessary.

Even though not much of the labour camps remain, Karaganda is the perfect example of a dark tourist site. There is an excellent Gulag Museum in the former headquarters of the labour camp in Dolinka.

Also nearby, the Ecological Museum covers other dark parts of Soviet history. The museum has an exhibition on the nuclear tests done in Kazakhstan and the debris that falls from the sky from the space program in Baikonur.

Contributed by Ellis of Backpack Adventures. Follow her on Instagram ! 

8. The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius – Pompeii, Italy

Pompeii was a thriving coastal city in Italy that was completely destroyed in 79AD when the neighbouring Mount Vesuvius erupted and covered the city in ash. It is a prime example of what is termed disaster tourism, where tourists visit a location where an environmental disaster has occurred. 

What makes the eruption of Mount Vesuvius more tragic was that the majority of people who died were slaves, who either had no means of escaping or were trapped. When archaeologists began excavating the site, they found several bodies. The ash preserved these bodies which allowed historians to create the human casts we see on site today. 

Seeing these casts in crouching positions while covering their faces, gave me shivers. To get a greater understanding of the site and everything inside of it, I highly suggest finding a good tour guide. This photographic travel guide to Pompeii gives lots more tips for planning a visit. 

Contributed by Natasha of And Then I Met Yoko. Follow Natasha on Instagram !

9. Mary King’s Close – Edinburgh, United Kingdom  

Below the Royal Mile in Edinburgh hides an underground street paved with dark history. Mary King’s Close was alive with residents when the bubonic plague seized the country in 1645. The grievous epidemic turned the once-thriving close into a dreadful place, where its inhabitants suffered a slow and torturous death.

Mary King’s Close was sealed off and used as a foundation for the Royal Exchange in the late 1700s. Years passed and its terrible secrets were left trapped within its dark walls. In the 1990s, the close was rediscovered and opened to the public, allowing people to explore the subterranean streets that once festered with disease. 

The mental image of the street once bustling with life left a lump in my throat – the locals had no idea how many would lose their lives to the Great Plague. Like Mary King’s Close, the entire city of Edinburgh is filled with dark and spooky places so be sure to check out Scotland’s capital if you’re a fan of the macabre.

Contributed by Wandering Crystal. Follow her on Instagram !

10. The Killing Fields and S-21 – Phnom Penh, Cambodia

During the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, execution, starvation and disease were allowed to flourish, killing an estimated three million people. Led by Pol Pot, the regime attempted to enforce brutal and inhumane policies to push Cambodia into being a classless society.

Phnom Penh and the surrounding area are home to S-21, a political prison used by the regime, and Choeung Ek, the largest of the Killing Fields. Over 12,000 prisoners were held at S-21 during the regime and with only seven known survivors, it’s a place known for unthinkable torture and suffering. The S-21 site now houses the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum where you can learn more about the Cambodian massacre. 

Much like S-21, a tour of the Cambodian Killing Fields can be hard to digest. There is a memorial stupa filled with the skulls of victims and you can still see bone fragments and strips of clothing along the paths. It’s a horrifying place but important to visit to ensure history doesn’t repeat itself.

Contributed by Ben at Horizon Unknown . Follow him on Facebook !

11. Abandoned Ghost Palace – Bali, Indonesia

Located near the village of Bedugul lies an abandoned hotel. Legend has it that in the early 1990s, the hotel began to be constructed by Tommy Suharto, the youngest son of the former Indonesian President. Tommy was later convicted of ordering the assassination of a judge who previously found him guilty of corruption and he subsequently went to prison. The hotel was never completed.

Another theory is that the hotel is haunted by the landlocked souls of labourers who were worked to death during its construction. The hotel, originally named Hotel Pondok Indah Bedugul, isn’t open for visitors but if you hand the guard 10,000 IDR, he’ll let you in to explore. I recommend seeing it as soon as possible because rumours indicate that visitors will no longer be permitted entrance (even with a bribe) because of how dangerous it is.

Contributed by Nat Wanderlust.

12. Auschwitz-Birkenau – Oświęcim, Poland

The “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was the official code name for the murder of Jews during World War II. At least 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis and a shocking 1.1 million people were murdered by the SS, mainly in gas chambers.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is located on two different sites. Auschwitz I comprises brick buildings and the Death Block where people were gassed. Auschwitz II, known as Birkenau, was opened as they could not cope with the scale of death at Auschwitz I. 

On arrival, you’ll see the famous train tracks where people were transported in and either sent to the gas chambers or given labour duty. Once the latter were emaciated, they were gassed and replaced with new prisoners.

I cried in horror seeing the piles of shoes, suitcases and false legs that once belonged to people. Human hair was used to make felt for socks given to the forces in submarines – 293 sacks of hair were found on liberation. Words cannot describe the emotions you’ll have upon seeing this symbol of this horrific dark chapter in our history.

Contributed by Vanessa from Wanders Miles, follow her on Instagram !

13. Day of the Dead – Oaxaca, Mexico  

The Mexican Day of the Dead festival is a darkly uplifting event that occurs each year between October 31st and November 2nd. On these days, family and friends celebrate the lives of loved ones passed. It is widely believed that for three days each year, the veil between this world and the next is especially thin. 

During the Day of the Dead festival, the spirits of the departed return to provide counsel to their living family members and friends. Much of the reunion is celebrated within the cemetery, where graves are cleaned and decorated for the occasion. On certain dates, families spend the whole night in the cemetery eating sugar skull sweets, drinking alcohol and playing music. 

UNESCO recognises ‘Dia de Los Muertos’ as being ‘ Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity ’. Experiencing the Day of the Dead is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; especially in Oaxaca where visiting graves is commonplace. Prepare for everything you have ever thought about death to be challenged.

Contributed by Castaway With Crystal. Follow her on Instagram! 

14. Red Terror Martyrs’ Museum – Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The military junta who took power after Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie was ousted were known as the Derg. After prolonged internal wranglings, Mengistu, a soldier from the ranks, emerged as their leader and the dictator of Ethiopia.

Within a couple of years, the Derg had created terror among ordinary Ethiopians, tens of thousands of whom had been imprisoned without trial and tortured, or worse, executed. The term ‘Red Terror’ comes from Mengistu’s famous speech when he smashed a bottle of blood to illustrate the killings to come. His regime is estimated to be responsible for the deaths of between 1.2 and 2 million Ethiopians.

Today, the horrors of Mengistu’s regime are remembered in the Red Terror Martyrs’ Museum in Addis Ababa . Opened in 2010, this small museum teaches about the atrocities of the regime. Photos of victims cover the walls alongside displays of human remains recovered from mass graves. We came away from the Martyrs’ Museum appalled by man’s inhumanity to man.

Contributed by Andrea of Happy Days Travel Blog. Follow her on Facebook ! 

15. Constitution Hill – Johannesburg, South Africa

Constitution Hill is now a living museum which tells the story of South Africa’s journey to democracy. It’s hard to comprehend that people like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi served time here in the 1960s and that the prison was still operational until 1982.

There are several sites that you can visit at Constitution Hill. The Old Fort is where white male prisoners were housed. Although the cells were overcrowded and unhygienic, the rooms are larger than those of the black prisoners. They were held in Block number 4. There was very little daylight and as I stepped inside, I was terrified that someone would shut the cell door behind me.

There’s also the Awaiting Trial Block. The block was demolished and the bricks were used to build South Africa’s new Constitutional Court. Thankfully this court serves to uphold the rights of all South Africans, regardless of colour, but the bricks are a poignant reminder of its troubled past.

Contributed by Fiona of Passport and Piano . Follow her on Facebook !

16. Shanghai Tunnels – Portland, USA

In a city known for the slogan ‘ Keep Portland Weird ,’ the Shanghai Tunnels fit right in. It’s believed that from 1850 until 1941, men in Portland, Oregon, were regularly kidnapped and sold to ship captains as labourers. During this period, there was a shortage of labour available for the city’s booming shipping industry and this created a black market. 

To capture these men, underground tunnels originally built to move inventory between businesses were repurposed for illicit use. Trapdoors were even installed in some of the local bars so that drunk men would drop into the tunnel below.

Today, tours of these tunnels are offered daily by a non-profit organisation, Shanghai Tunnels/Portland Underground. All tour participants are advised to be prepared for spending an hour in a confined space. While the nature of the tour is sad and tragic, it’s an important part of Portland’s history.

Contributed by Wendy of Empty Nesters Hit the Road. Follow her on Facebook !

17. Brno Ossuary – Brno, Czech Republic

Of the attractions in Brno , several of them could be classed as dark tourism attractions. The one that moved me the most, though, was the ossuary underneath the St. James Church.

Surrounding this church, which is known as the ‘Kostnice u sv. Jakuba’ in Czech, was one of the main churchyard cemeteries in Brno. Eventually, as the city grew, there was no room left for new burials so a grave rotation system was adopted. 

When a burial took place, the body was left in the grave for between 10 to 12 years. After that, the bones were taken out to make room for the next burial. The displaced remains were then relocated to the ossuary, where bones from thousands of graves were piled up.

It’s estimated that Brno Ossuary holds the bones of more than 50,000 people, which makes it the second-largest ossuary in Europe; only second to the Paris catacombs. The mortal remains laid to rest here include victims of the Swedish siege of Brno and the Thirty Years’ War, as well as many victims of plague and cholera epidemics.

Contributed by Wendy of The Nomadic Vegan. Follow her on Instagram ! 

Do you have any dark tourism examples to share? Let us know in the comments!

9 thoughts on “17 Must-Visit Dark Tourism Destinations Around the World”

Comuna 13 is spellt with only 1 -m-.

I wonder why choose the cemetery in Sucre, when so many others are more characteristic (eg. Père Lachaise in Paris) or even ‘livelier’ (eg. in Santiago de Chile).

Interesting & important topic though. I’m in the process of rewriting an article about the mines of Potosi. That is one dark tourism destination I strongly oppose, for one simple reason; people are still dying in there.

Thanks for the heads up Anthony! 🙂

I chose the cemetery in Sucre because it was a little bit off the beaten track – I like visiting the lesser known places as well as the more famous ones.

I can understand your point about the mines of Potosí and can see why you disagree with it. I must say though, from my own personal experience, I found my visit to be hugely enlightening. I was initially very torn about the idea of visiting an active mine but in the end, we chose a company run by an ex-miner who took us into the mine personally. In my opinion, our visit never felt voyeuristic at all and the miners seemed very grateful for the tourists visiting. A percentage of the tour cost went directly into the funding the healthcare of the miners when needed and also towards maintenance of the mine.

Such a great and informative post, Sheree! There were so many sites here that I was not even aware of – that is why sharing posts about dark tourist sites is so important! It really helps educate the world and helps us honour the past and the lives that were lost at some of these sites.

Like you, I am a huge fan of cemeteries. It is so wonderful that some countries treat death as a natural normal part of life (unlike some of our countries!). It really helps people remember happy memories of their loved ones they recently lost.

Thanks so much for being a part of it Crystal! I also learnt about loads of new dark tourism sites – it has definitely been an eduction as there was plenty of these I had never even heard of. It is definitely important to make sure the stories behind these places get told.

Thank you for including us in this fantastic collab!

I love how varied these sites are, and that you’ve included a lot of lesser know dark tourism destinations mixed in with some of the big ones. Even as professional dark tourists (that’s a thing, right?), we hadn’t heard of all of these places. The Shanghai Tunnels were completely new to me, but definitely want to head to Portland now.

I’m also a little embarrassed to admit that despite being to Hamburg MANY times, I was not aware of the St. Nicholas’ Church. I blame that on the fact that I was visiting a friend and not really touristing…

Awesome post everyone! I think it is really important for people to visit at least one of these in their lifetime. I think we are jaded from the major events that happened to our world and it’s people when we are told the stories. To see the places in real life, it puts life into perspective and how crazy life can be if we don’t fight for what is right.

I couldn’t agree more. Even though visiting these kinds of places is hard, I still think it is really important to help us realise the human effect of what we see on the television. As you said, it is only once you truly understand the devastation that you realise the importance of fighting for the right things.

Great article . I’ve been to a lot of places around the world and haven’t even heard of some of these .

Thanks Jennifer! I’ve certainly added a lot of places to my future visit list!

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• Dark tourism in the Greek islands: top 6 spine-chilling attractions

Solve the mystery!

• Ferry Tickets

If you played the “Mysteries of Peking” a thousand times as a kid, if you have the heart of an explorer and you get fascinated by history , then hop on the ferry to go on an adventure with Ferryhopper and explore dark tourism in 6 Greek islands :

• The Leper Island and the strange shadows in Crete
• The Kaverian Mysteries and the Topakes of Samothrace
• The enigmatic dragon houses in Euboea
• Makronisos, the island of torture
• Gyaros, the island of death
• The hidden tunnels in Leros

Abandoned buildings in Spinalonga

1. The Leper Island of Spinalonga and the strange shadows in Crete

Our dark tourism tour starts from Crete . Take your backpack, grab a flashlight, your notebook, and a sandwich for the road, and off you go to unravel the secrets and discover the mysteries of Greece’s largest island!

Spinalonga, the island of tears

Hop on the ferry from Piraeus to Crete and get ready to experience the centuries-old history and fascinating past of Crete. The first stop is at Spinalonga which officially became the island of the Lepers in 1903 and was the new home of all those people affected by Hansen's disease .

The boat will drop you off at the exact point where once the sick were disembarking after bidding their loved ones and the world of the living farewell for the last time.

The island may have been synonymous with social exclusion and rejection. However, on a stroll through the Island of Tears, you will be shocked by the people’s determination who created a society with values and rules and built their own settlement including a school and a hospital.

So, let the stone alleys fable about the adventures of the Lepers there, a dark but fascinating story. Discover the culture of the living dead of Spinalonga, enter their stone houses , and visit the school. Say goodbye to Leper island with a visit to the Spinalonga museum where you will find photos and information about life there.

The impressive Castle of Spinalonga

Drosoulites, the mysterious shadows in Fragokastello

Leaving behind the charged atmosphere of Spinalonga , we head towards the area of Fragokastello which is about 20 minutes by car from the Chora of Sfakia .

Here, between the end of May and the beginning of June, the Drosoulites appear surrounding the Venetian Castle . According to the legend, these moving shadows are the ghosts of the fighters who died in the Battle of Frankokastello on May 17, 1828, during the Greek revolution against the Turks.

Εversince, on the anniversary of the battle, shadows resembling soldiers  surround the Frankokastello Fortress . What do you think? Are Drosoulites the ghosts of the fallen soldiers or is it an optical illusion? You just have to discover it for yourself!

2. The Kaverian Mysteries in Samothrace

Greece has a lot of mysterious islands and destinations attracting fans of dark tourism and people who get fascinated by unexplainable phenomena. One of these places is located in Northern Greece . Take the ferry from Alexandroupolis to Samothrace to reach the enigmatic island in just 2 hours !

Samothrace is considered an “energy vortex” and there is no better place to feel it than the Sanctuary of the Great Gods . There, in this place of worship and celebration of the Kaverian Mysteries , you will find traces of the ancient religion of the Kaverian Gods.

Do not leave the island of Samothrace without visiting the enchanting natural pools ( vathres in Greek) and the impressive waterfall of Fonias where, according to legend, the topakes , mythical creatures that protect the forest, and the natural pools of the island.

The Sanctuary of the Great Gods in Samothrace

3. The enigmatic dragon houses in Euboea

From the Topakes of the mysterious Samothrace, we set sail to solve another mystery, the dragon houses, also known as drakospita on the island of Euboea. There, you will find more than 20 drakospita scattered in the mountains of the island. These megalithic structures were built with rectangular stones and limestone slabs.

So, let’s go visit the most famous and well-preserved dragon house of Euboea (Evia) which is located on Ochi mountain at 1,365 meters altitude. It is an unsolved mystery and also an architectural paradox of how these giant slabs survived through all these years with no foundations and no material to stabilize the stones.

According to the legend, these structures were the dragons’ dens overlooking the area with their yellowish eyes. Get on the ferry from Volos to Euboea , explore the mountainous region of the island, and discover the true origin of the Dragon Houses.

A well-preserved dragon house (drakospito) in Euboea 

4. Makronisos, the island of torture

From the dragon’s den and ancient Greece, we transport to the dark period of the Greek Civil War and the island of Makronisos , a place of exile.

As soon as you approach Makronisos by boat from Lavrio, you only see a deserted island. However, between 1947 and 1950, the same island was packed with up to 100,000 political prisoners . You can see the remains of the concentration camp and feel the charged atmosphere of the place.

Walk among the marble slabs , visit the churches and the old theater of the First Order used as a means of “reformation and revival” for the prisoners.

However, the theatrical scene was just for the show. The concentration camp’s gimmick was a desperate attempt to convince the world that Makronisos promoted art as a means of learning. Of course, the reality had nothing to do with freedom of speech, expression, and art. It was all about constant torture, and psychological and physical violence, marking Makronisos as the Greek Dachau .

The island of Makronisos from Sounion

5. Gyaros, the island of death

The dark period of torture in the concentration camp of Makronissos hands over the baton to Gyaros. A few minutes before disembarking from the boat, you will see the prisons of Gyaros looming on the horizon, the same prisons that were built by the political prisoners stone by stone .

Arriving on the island of death ( Thanatonisi  in Greek) which is also known as the Devil's island, you take a long hard look at the inhuman cruelty , evident in every corner of the island. You see clumps of hair stuck in the cracks of the walls that were taken from the prisoners by force and used instead of plaster. You also see the suffocating solitary confinement and the rotten prison cells. 

Sadness and anger are the dominant sentiments while walking through the prison of the arid island of Gyaros near Syros . Heavy iron doors and dark cells where rats and scorpions once frolicked among the prisoners are still spine-chilling today.

A little further, you will also find the cemetery of Gyaros with people who died from grueling work, torture, and malnutrition. The Cycladic island that crushed thousands of human souls is certainly part of the dark tourism and the dark history of Greece .

The arid and uninhabited island of Gyaros

6. The hidden tunnels in Leros

On our journey to discover the top chilling attractions for dark tourism in the Greek islands, we hop on a ferry from Piraeus to Leros making our last stop in the Dodecanese.

With an eventful past, Leros has its own secrets with unexplained phenomena , hidden tunnels, and impressive monuments. Your starting point in Leros is the War Museum located inside the Merikia Tunnel. The sound of the deafening sirens of war from the loudspeakers when entering the tunnel will definitely leave you in awe.

There, the Battle of Leros that took place in Lakki comes to life with the personal belongings, soldiers’ torn uniforms, and helmets pierced by bullets.

Around 5 km from the Museum of War, you will also find the building of the Parabolic Acoustic Mirror which can pick up sound from great distances and warn the army of an air raid . There, according to locals, sometimes you can hear sirens of war and soldiers’ screams .

Tip : the seabed of Leros is the home of many wrecks from the famous "Queen Olga" destroyer ships that sunk in 1943 to german aircraft from the Second World War.

The bay of Lakki in Leros

From Devil's Island to the Dragon Houses of Euboea and the hidden tunnels of Leros, the Greek islands have many unsolved mysteries. Prepare your suitcase, download our Ferryhopper App on your mobile phone to track your ferry at any time in real-time, and book your ferry tickets  on Ferryhopper with no hidden fees !

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• The National Garden

• Heraklion Archaeological Museum

• Andritsaina

• Missolonghi
• Thermopylae

• Rhodes City Tours
• Grand Master Palace

• The Colosseum
• The Roman Forum
• The Vatican City
• Castel Sant' Angelo
• Saint Peter's Basilica

• Doge's Palace
• Saint Mark's Basilica

• Sempione Park

• The Tower of Pisa

• The Red Light District

• The Alhambra Palace

• Royal Alcazares
• The Seville Cathedral

• Lázaro Galdiano Museum
• Archaeological Museum of Madrid

• Montjuïc Cable Car

• The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba

• The Mallorca Cathedral

• The Hagia Sophia

• Ephesus Ancient City Tour

• Times Square
• Central Park
• Ellis Island & National Immigration Museum
• Niagara Falls

• Balboa Park

• Star Ferry Pier
• Victoria Peak

• Ruins of St. Paul

• Louvre Museum

• Orange Roman Theatre & Museum

• St. George Castle
• Belem Tower
• Jerónimos Monastery

• Cathedral of Oporto

• Quinta da Regaleira
• The Pena Palace
• Moorish Castle

• Museu Nacional Frei Manuel do Cenáculo

• The Citadel of Qaitbay

• The Hanging Church

• Vajdahunyad Castle

Dark Tourism

Dark tourism refers to traveling or touring to places that are historically associated with war, tragedy or natural disaster.

Bearing witness to the most important historical events, these sites are a significant source of how the past has shaped our current societies’ present. Recording and sharing narratives that investigate how European societies deal with their troubled pasts today, is a valuable educational tool that helps us preserve the memories while at the same time learning from them.

Clio Muse dark tourism tours examine historical incidents that took place in different countries including Greece, Germany, Poland, Bosnia, Ireland, Cyprus, Kosovo, Spain, and Norway.

Dark Tourism tours

Sarajevo: Humanity during the Siege

Nicosia: the world’s last divided capital

Daily life in divided Berlin

Jewish heritage: Past and present

The Rising and the War for Independence

Contested and competing memory spaces in Kosovo

The Memory of the Warsaw ghetto

Women: before and after civil war

World War II in Kristiansand: On Choices and Values

Privacy overview.

Dark Tourism, the Dark Side of Cultural Tourism. Application to the City of Porto

• Conference paper
• First Online: 01 February 2019
• Cite this conference paper

• Dália Liberato 3 ,
• Pedro Liberato 3 &
• Andreia Gonçalves 4  

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics ((SPBE))

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1 Citations

Dark Tourism represents an extension of cultural tourism, once it was necessary to innovate this tourism typology justified by a decrease in demand. This change, was verified in the tourist experience level, that is, to provide unique moments in the cultural level, through the experience, so that it could be the option for a greater number of tourists in the destination. Dark Tourism sites include concentration camps, inactive prisons, serial killers homes, cemeteries, and all other venues that meet the standards of death, tragedy and suffering (Biran et al. 2011; Braithwaite and Lee 2006; Dunkley et al. 2011; Kang et al. 2012; Light 2016, 2017; Podoshen 2013; Podoshen et al. 2015; Stone and Sharpley 2008, 2009; Stone 2012; Yan et al. 2016; and Zhang et al. 2016). In Portugal there are some sites associated with the practice of Dark Tourism, although this is not yet sufficiently explored. The main objective of this investigation is the evaluation of Dark Tourism potential in the city of Porto. Partial objectives are: proving the existence of a market niche in Porto associated to Dark Tourism; understand if the city of Porto has tourism resources and tourism demand, able to develop a tourism experience within the Dark Tourism offer; and to sensitize the Destination Management Organizations (DMO’s) in Porto to the opportunity of this market, through 178 questionnaires, applied to tourists/visitors in the city of Porto. This research confirmed some objectives, variables and proposed fields.

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School of Hospitality and Tourism, Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Vila do Conde, Portugal

Dália Liberato & Pedro Liberato

Porto Accounting and Business School, Polytechnic of Porto, Porto, Portugal

Andreia Gonçalves

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University of West Attica, Athens, Greece

Vicky Katsoni

Business School, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

Marival Segarra-Oña

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Liberato, D., Liberato, P., Gonçalves, A. (2019). Dark Tourism, the Dark Side of Cultural Tourism. Application to the City of Porto. In: Katsoni, V., Segarra-Oña, M. (eds) Smart Tourism as a Driver for Culture and Sustainability. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03910-3_12

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