Most people are used to the fact that travel is trips to beautiful places, visiting excursions, viewing famous sights that are in all guidebooks. In the minds of ordinary travelers, a vacation to another city or country should make a pleasant impression and remain in memory as the brightest memory of recent years.
However, travel has a downside, which is commonly called "dark tourism". Such tourists are not interested in national cuisine, they do not want to look at the pyramids in Giza or the Eiffel Tower - they prefer to explore the catacombs, where several centuries ago thousands of people died from the plague, spend nights in crypts in cemeteries, go to the sites of plane crashes or terrible man-made disasters. Many people do not understand why dark tourism has gained such great popularity and what pleasure such travelers experience when they visit places where people died and suffered.
How did dark tourism develop?
This term appeared in 1996, when the next issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies was published, but the concept of "dark tourism" gained popularity only in 2000. At this time, a book with the same name was published on the shelves of stores: on its pages, the authors told the reader about the varieties of this type of tourism and what it is. However, Malcolm Foley and John Lennon (not the one who was in the Beatles) failed to explain to the audience why travelers have a love for places that ordinary people are even afraid to approach.
The most popular destination of dark tourism
The unofficial title of the most popular place among lovers of dark tourism is India, or rather, the banks of the sacred Ganges River. Locals come here to cremate deceased relatives and friends, and then scatter their ashes over the river. In this region, it is not customary to use modern electric crematoria - corpses are burned on funeral pyres. Before burning, a deceased person is dressed in the best outfit that he had, placed on a bamboo stretcher and carried to the river. If the deceased has passed away in old age, musicians come to the burning and perform Indian folk melodies. Relatives of deceased Indians do not object to the cremation being watched by strangers.
The most popular city among the "dark tourists" is Varanasi - it is here that rich Indians come in their old age to be burned and scattered here. Varanasi is considered a sacred city for the inhabitants of India, so death here for them is an honor and even a necessity. According to legend, the soul of a person whose ashes were scattered over the Ganges will not reincarnate and will come out of the eternal wheel of Samsara.
Where else do they go as part of dark tourism?
Varanasi is one of the few dark tourism destinations that has acquired the status of recognized. Basically, extreme tourists have to go to places where either a lot of people are buried, or they died en masse here, and the earth remembers the atmosphere of horror and despair that reigned during the disaster.
Places of mass murder and torture
The more deaths in the chosen place, the more attractive it is for travelers. The most popular of these places are the Polish concentration camps built by the Nazis during the Second World War, the "killing fields" in Cambodia, where pol Pot's Khmer Rouge brutalized, the Katyn training ground near Smolensk and others. Also, dark tourists visit museums of torture, locations of mass battles that claimed thousands of lives, places of executions. Particularly sophisticated travelers study the history of serial maniacs and the places where they committed the murders, make a detailed route and go on a journey along it. So, tourists often visit places where Jack the Ripper, Andrei Chikatilo, Anatoly Slivko and other murderers mocked their victims.
Disaster sites
Disaster tourism attracts people who are interested in the history of various tragedies that claimed the lives of hundreds or even thousands of people. Travelers go to the places where the disaster occurred, explore the location and are filled with impressions. The most popular destinations for tourism of disasters are Fukushima and Pripyat - places that have suffered from man-made accidents. Terrible earthquakes and hurricanes, killer waves and tsunamis, explosions and plane crashes - events that later become the reason for dark tourists to go to the scene of terrible incidents.
Cemetery
The most harmless in the framework of dark tourism is considered to be walks through cemeteries and overnight stays in crypts. Ordinary travelers who went to the burial places of famous personalities, for a while became dark tourists. Some guides even offer their groups of tourists to spend the night in the cemetery, having previously agreed with the police and authorities.
Mystical places
Abandoned castles, ruins of cities, places where they saw aliens, houses with ghosts and other locations that are shrouded in an atmosphere of mysticism are popular destinations among dark tourists. Most of all, such travelers like to visit popular places about which several dozen legends are composed: the Bermuda Triangle, the Castle of Count Dracula in Romania, Zone-51, Dyatlov Pass or the black bamboo hollow in China.
Why do we need dark tourism?
Scientists who have been researching this phenomenon do not have a consensus on why dark tourism is so popular among people from all over the world. Some believe that in this way travelers satisfy their emotional arousal, others are sure that visiting places of mass graves or murders leads a person into euphoria.
However, the dark tourists themselves claim that by traveling to scary places, they satisfy the need for thrills. When they arrive at the Paris catacombs or the crash site of a Boeing, they seem to be in a horror movie.
John Lennon, who wrote a book about dark tourism, is sure that the places of death of hundreds of people attract people who are able to do evil. The author of the work is not sure that dark tourism is an ethical phenomenon, but he is sure that people have the right to know the truth about disasters and tragedies that have occurred in the history of mankind. Lennon urged dark tourists not to consider such trips a way of entertainment, but to respect the deceased people who died in torment and fear.
