Dark Tourism: Where Tragedy Becomes a Tourist Draw

Dark tourism, also known as grief tourism, is a relatively new term that's still not well defined.

Mostly, it involves visiting sites and places related in some way to violent death or suffering - places that might qualify as macabre. Grief tourism is a similar term and they're sometimes used interchangeably, but I find them hard to differentiate.

An even more graphic word for this type of travel is thanatourism, from the Greek word thanatos, the Ancient Greek personification of death.

To add to the confusion, this is different from disaster tourism, which deals mostly with regions that have suffered from natural disasters rather than man-made ones. But they have plenty in common.

There are plenty of examples of dark tourism, or grief tourism. Here are a few of the most famous, or notorious:

· Ground Zero, site of the former World Trade Center twin buildings

· Nazi death camps, where six million people died

· Crash sites, such as Lockerbie in Scotland, where a TWA jumbo jet was blown up in 1988

· the Paris tunnel in which Princess Diana was killed in 1997 being chased by paparazzi

Cambodia's killing fields
Ian Armstrong

· Cambodia's killing fields (Choeng Ek Extermination Camp), mass graves for some 20,000 Cambodians murdered during the Khmer Rouge genocide of the late 1970s

· Central Park's Strawberry Fields memorial to John Lennon, who was assassinated nearby outside the Dakota in 1980

· Most cemetaries, including Arlington in the US and the Père Lachaise in Paris

· Soham, a small English town, where two 10-year-olds were kidnapped and murdered by their school caretaker

· Hiroshima in Japan, where the first atomic bomb was dropped

· Chernobyl, where tour guides use geiger counters to test radiation while escorting visitors

· the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, in memory of a 13-year-old Jewish schoolgirl who kept a diary while hiding from the Nazis

· Hitler's mountain residence at Berchtesgaden, in the Bavarian Alps

Hitler's bunker, Berchtesgaden
wong zitao via Flickr CC

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16