What is Dark tourism?
And, celebrating one year of this newsletter
Hello readers!
It has officially been one year since I started writing this newsletter and I am so happy that you’re here, that readership has grown, that I’ve been able to maintain this with enthusiasm, and that I’ve connected with some of you even more recently in the comments. :) Thank you for that.
I’m starting this year with more plans regarding this newsletter and so I hope and think that it will be more focused, valuable, and interesting for readers. As I wrote in the previous two editions, I’ll be reaching out to some of you for interviews and questionnaires. I’m also working on a general survey for subscribers and not-yet-subscribers.
Dark Tourism
But for this month, the topic is Dark Tourism. What is it? What are some examples? Why do people visit such sites? I’ll dive into all of those and you will all probably learn that you’ve visited such sites even if you did not know it at the time. For an explanation and some background, the Washington Post has an informative article with examples. The best summary of dark tourism is below, by a professor whose name gave me a giggle.
Dark tourism refers to visiting places where some of the darkest events of human history have unfolded. That can include genocide, assassination, incarceration, ethnic cleansing, war or disaster — either natural or accidental. Some might associate the idea with ghost stories and scares, but those who study the practice say it’s unrelated to fear or supernatural elements.
“It’s not a new phenomenon,” says J. John Lennon, a professor of tourism at Glasgow Caledonian University, in Scotland, who coined the term with a colleague in 1996
Netflix has a series called Dark Tourist where a New Zealand journalist visited dark tourism sites around the world. It was cancelled before a second season because of the pandemic. I have not watched it but I am adding it to my queue, reviews are not good but I am hopeful that it is interesting and informative.
Have you been to a dark tourism site? I visited the KGB museum in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2016. It is the first place I think of when I hear the term. I believe the museum is now called the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights - a more fitting name that recognizes and bravery of the victims instead of evil. I visited this place on my own and took photos, mostly of the outside, and a few of the inside, I was purposely not in any of them. It didn’t feel appropriate. I was mainly taking the photos to remember it for myself, and to show the stories and realities of the situation to others.
It was a museum and a place that made me think about how much I did not know about that part of the world. It also made me think that where we are born seems so random but how it shapes our lives. I was born in 1981 in the United States. If I had been born in 1981 under Soviet occupation my life today would be vastly different. This is such a broad statement as well as an obvious one, but think about how different your worldview would be if you had been born anywhere else like Russia, China, Kenya, Iran, Argentina, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Gaza, Australia, Japan, the list goes on. Anywhere and any of those would have resulted in a different you on this earth. It is interesting to try and put yourself in someone else’s shoes and think about how that might have led to a completely different you. Understanding different perspectives is important.
But back to dark tourism, I’d like to think that we don’t necessarily have an odd or macabre fascination with sites like Chornobyl or the killing fields of Phnom Penh (now called the Choeung Genocidal Center), or Auschwitz. But instead, many of us want to learn more about things we did not experience. I’d like to think that those of us who enjoy learning about history would like to prevent terrible things from happening again.
Mr./Dr. J. John Lennon states that dark tourism sites
“…are important sites that tell us a lot about what it is to be human,” says Lennon, the tourism professor. “I think they’re important places for us to reflect on and try to better understand the evil that we’re capable of.”
Since you now have a background on Dark Tourism, next issue will go a bit further with an academic article exploring various themes and the motivations behind visiting such sites. I want to keep it from getting too heavy in one newsletter.
Since I mentioned the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius, I have included a few photos from my visit below, the only ones I took.
From top left, clockwise: cell door, clothing for a prisoner, telephone from the office of the KGB headquarters, a cell where prisoners were kept.
Links
Chernobyl’s reactor room opens to tourists.
Time to lighten it up….
Making tourism dementia-friendly.
Greenland’s masked celebrations around the beginning of January are a blend of Inuit and Danish traditions.
The best places to see this year’s solar eclipse.
The Boeing 787 Max nightmare, you’ve probably read or heard about it. The model has been grounded in the US because of a piece of one plane dislodging during a flight that activated decompression of the cabin. If you want to read about it, Wikipedia has a thorough explanation and I am hoping it is accurate! I read it, if flying makes you nervous, maybe don’t read it.
A soundwalk. I added this because my sister went to China about ten years ago on a sponsored trip and the project that she completed and submitted as part of the research was about the sights and sounds of the markets in very Chinese cities. She is a music teacher and was travelling there with other humanities teachers from the US. While that is not exactly the same as what the author of that article writes about, it is something to do in any new space or even where you live. How often do you just walk and listen rather than talk or have headphones on/earbuds in?
Consuming
This year I have read two books already, Washington Black and I finally finished The Three Body Problem! Since most of it was ready in 2024, it counts toward my big goal of 43 books this year. Currently finishing up 150 Glimpses of the Beatles (500+ pages) and enjoying the short stories in it. I am a fast reader and love to read and I’ve made it a goal to work through the books in my apartment this year and not buy new ones. I enjoyed Washington Black, it is about a young slave on a Barbados sugar plantation in the 1830s who is chosen to assist the master’s brother and ends up with a very unexpected and adventurous life. Three Body is a sci-fi story, part 1 of a trilogy, about a distant planet making contact with Earth. As I previously mentioned in another newsletter, is slow for the first 60 pages and then gets going. Netflix also made a series of the first book.
Watching
Hunger Games a Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - I read the original trilogy of these books and now I want to read this prequel. This movie was way more violent than I recall the other movies being - perhaps because it was early in the Hunger Games creation. It is the origin story of Coriolanus Snow, the president in the movie and book trilogy.
Loudermilk - A three-season TV show on Netflix that ended in 2020 and was recently added. I started watching this because it stars Ron Livingston as Sam Loudermilk and I like him even if he ended up being my least favourite boyfriend on Sex and the City. He’s great in Office Space and Band of Brothers and this! He’s a substance abuse counsellor who was once a music critic and always kind of a Debbie Downer. His character reminded me of John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity because he’s a pretentious music snob. This bit did not make me dislike him.
That’s all for this edition. Thank you for reading and for
This is a really interesting topic--I didn't know dark tourism was a 'thing', but I understand it from my own lens. I have traveled to several battlefield sites over the years (does that qualify?) in the US, from the both the Civil and Revolutionary wars, and they are some of the most memorable places to visit. My late husband was a huge history buff, and we visited out of his interest (which became mine) and to further our perspectives on what had happened.
I definitely agree with Aoife about these spaces having an energy you can sense if you're aware of the possibility and in tune with your own energetic awareness--I've had that many times. Hope you continue to examine this. I'll look forward to reading more.
Sonya, this issue is really interesting and I loved reading a further introduction to Dark Tourism -- something I’m intrigued by in terms of it being its own travel experience thing while also feeling complicated emotions around when tourist/travel experiences overlap with what is essentially dark tourism. On this note, have you heard of Eckhart Tolle’s Pain Body thesis? If not, basically it can feel like an energetic field around places where deeply negative (read: awful) things have happened. Did you feel this when you were at the museum in Vilnius? I definitely felt something similar when I was at the House of Leaves -- the surveillance centre and courtroom of the secret police -- in Tirana, Albania. Equally though, sometimes I feel like you can sense the Pain Body in places where without really knowing what it is that’s “making your spidey senses tingle”. So interested in what you have to say about this! Hoping your January is lovely so far ☺️