Magdalena Banaszkiewicz

Tourism in (Post)socialist Eastern Europe

To most of us in Western Europe and North America, Eastern Europe has had a very special place in recent history. The focus of the Cold War between the ‘First and Second Worlds’ and immediately before that the most bitter center of the hot war between the Fascist and Communist regimes, life in Central and Eastern Europe has been far from ‘normal’ in the sense of now taken for granted aspects of human life such as mobility and tourism. Constrained by political positioning and citizenship, as in Maoist China (Graburn, 2002) rather than personal economic wealth, mobility was channeled by one’s employment and contacts (Keck-Szajbel, 2013; Keck-Szajbel & Stola, 2015). And within the Socialist countries much of the domestic tourism was regularized as ‘social tourism’, assigned holidays that were not bought but were the privilege of one’s employment or Party position. Obviously, the transitions from those systems and sub-systems have been almost total and transformational. But to the people of Central and Eastern Europe themselves, the centuries of history before World War II are probably more important and certainly more immanent and eras of civilizational movement, conquest and turmoil than most in the West are aware of. The early invasions of the Huns, Slavs, Mongols, and the Muslim Turks – the rise of early empires and colonization, by the Bulgars and Magyars and soon the Swedes and particularly the Russians and the spread of the powerful Hanseatic league along the North. The stability and even existence of the most important countries has fluctuated – Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Croatia, Belarus and even more remarkably the very existence of Poland and Ukraine. Other regions or ethnic groups’ territories, came to the fore, changed names and receded – Bohemia, Galicia, Wallachia, Ruthenia, Moravia and many others. And to the survivors of this history, today’s ‘post-socialist’ Eastern Europeans, equally significant as we will see are the memories of displacements and movements within and across these unstable entities, the remains of biological and

A dissonant heritage site revisited – the case of Nowa Huta in Krakow

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to portray, through the performative lens, the network of social relations associated with the so-called ‘Crazy Tours’ in Nowa Huta, a former socialist (the easternmost and the most populous district of Krakow, built predominantly in the socialist–realist style) district of Krakow. Such initiatives have been emerging in the last few years in different places across Central and Eastern Europe, evidencing the trend to exploit the communist heritage in a commercial way. The project, which methodologically draws on discourse analysis, participant observations and semi-structured interviews, was to characterize the main features of the process of change in the perception of dissonant heritage as well as the revitalization of Nowa Huta as a tourist site.