ABSTRACT

A growing area of tourism interest has focused on the field of Dark Tourism, or research examining the desire for people to visit sites of death and the macabre. Although research on this topic is not new, there exists a need to better understand how to compare the “performance” of the resulting museums and memorials that have been established to commemorate these sites. For instance, previous research has studied museums that focused on specific forms of death, such as the Holocaust and genocide museums, while others examined death at battlefield sites, as well as prisons. A commonality of previous studies has been to better understand the supply and demand for such sites, particularly why formalized sites exist and why people choose to visit them. What appears to be missing from the literature is critical examination of the ways of measuring the success of the marketing and commercialization of such sites. In order to address the gap in knowledge, this chapter wishes to extend the understanding of how dark tourism sites are marketed. This examination is taken from two perspectives. The first is to examine a specific type of memorializing, one that centres on the concept of the siege of a city. Although a siege has a direct military connection and directive, a siege also includes a greater emphasis on the impact upon the citizens and society in which these military and political actions occurred. In other words, in additional to the military deaths, a siege also includes civilian deaths, deaths that may or may not result directly from physical conflict, but also starvation, exposure to the elements, etc. The second perspective is to better understand how the military and civilian deaths resulting from a siege are emphasized or minimized for political and economic gain by way of attractions, museums, and other revenue-generating activities. Thus this research takes a case study approach to compare and contrast how two cities with similarities in terms of death and despair in the twentieth century, by way of living through a siege. Respectively, the sieges are Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in the then Soviet Union, now Russia, in 1941-1944 (872 days), and Sarajevo, in Bosnia and Herzegovina (previously

part of Yugoslavia) from 1992-1996 (1,425 days). The research examines how these cities have “succeeded” in the commercializing of such horrific events. To examine this question, multiple methods are employed. The first takes a secondary data approach by examining the major marketing literature related to how to best evaluate the performance, both economic and political, of sites of death and despair. The second places the two sieges within a dark tourism framework under the guise of the authenticity of the attractions as they relate to the siege. The final method presents the finding of personal interviews conducted by one of the authors with knowledge experts of this topic in Saint Petersburg (Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad) and Sarajevo (survivor of the siege). These findings are linked with the research literature to develop a greater understanding of how to best measure the commercialization of such sites. This study helps to advance the understanding of a growing field of business, the consumption of death, with ongoing political and societal debate as to the appropriateness of such sites.