Page 217 - Dark Shades of Istria
P. 217
cluding Remarks 10
Here we have a pattern of tomorrow’s complex European identity
that awaits us and we have no real answers to it. We already have a
multi-layered independence here, a post-identity, if you like. Ljub-
ljana and Zagreb, take a close look at how it is also possible to protect
differently a sacred national interest.
Milan Rakovac, Istrian writer, 2015
This study proposes that dark tourism is part of a wider and probably
more commercial perspective of death, which permeates many aspects
of people’s lives.¹ Residents of Istria as well as people in general live the
death of others (ancestors) by consuming their fate, tragedy and legacy at
memorial and dark tourism sites; the contemporary world is inherently
created by death and its consequences (Harrison, 2003). Both memory
and dark tourism are just two interconnected ways with which the living
mediate with those who have traumatically/violently passed away. This
way, they only reflect acts of reverence, respect, gratitude and pride.
The research does not rely on one singular theory or concept, but is
a multi-disciplinary study based on a variety of sources. It attempts to
draw upon the in-depth discourses explored by many Slovenian, Croa-
tian, Italian and other scholars from different academic branches. We
were looking for a relatively rarely investigated/discussed nexus between
(dark) tourism, memory and historiography, where we could not ignore
the inherent links between Istria and the armed forces. More specifically,
the purposes of the research were to:
• provide an understanding of what memory and dark tourism mean
in a specific regional environment (trans-border region of Istria);
and
• establish a representation of topics related to the Istrian history (of
conflicts) of the 20th century, contemporary public memorial prac-
tices and dark tourism in leading regional electronic mass media,
based on which the specific media-created social reality can be iden-
tified.
¹ In this case, thanatourism would probably be a more accurate term, but death (and the
death system/dance of death) itself was not the main focus of the study.
217
Here we have a pattern of tomorrow’s complex European identity
that awaits us and we have no real answers to it. We already have a
multi-layered independence here, a post-identity, if you like. Ljub-
ljana and Zagreb, take a close look at how it is also possible to protect
differently a sacred national interest.
Milan Rakovac, Istrian writer, 2015
This study proposes that dark tourism is part of a wider and probably
more commercial perspective of death, which permeates many aspects
of people’s lives.¹ Residents of Istria as well as people in general live the
death of others (ancestors) by consuming their fate, tragedy and legacy at
memorial and dark tourism sites; the contemporary world is inherently
created by death and its consequences (Harrison, 2003). Both memory
and dark tourism are just two interconnected ways with which the living
mediate with those who have traumatically/violently passed away. This
way, they only reflect acts of reverence, respect, gratitude and pride.
The research does not rely on one singular theory or concept, but is
a multi-disciplinary study based on a variety of sources. It attempts to
draw upon the in-depth discourses explored by many Slovenian, Croa-
tian, Italian and other scholars from different academic branches. We
were looking for a relatively rarely investigated/discussed nexus between
(dark) tourism, memory and historiography, where we could not ignore
the inherent links between Istria and the armed forces. More specifically,
the purposes of the research were to:
• provide an understanding of what memory and dark tourism mean
in a specific regional environment (trans-border region of Istria);
and
• establish a representation of topics related to the Istrian history (of
conflicts) of the 20th century, contemporary public memorial prac-
tices and dark tourism in leading regional electronic mass media,
based on which the specific media-created social reality can be iden-
tified.
¹ In this case, thanatourism would probably be a more accurate term, but death (and the
death system/dance of death) itself was not the main focus of the study.
217
