Cultural tourism in Central and Southeast Europe. Its selective utilization of cultural layers

The purpose – Cultural and city tourism are intensively promoted by most Central and Southeast European countries. But frequently identity and historiography of the modern nation states is at odds with some periods of history and emphasizes others. This may result in a rather selective presentation of the cultural heritage also to tourists and in difficulties to define a tourism brand. Selective presentation refers also to the cultural heritage of minorities and Communism. Methodology, approach – The paper investigates into the attitudes of various Central and Southeast European countries in this respect. Methods applied are personal observations as well as surveys of websites of national and regional tourist boards. Findings – Political strive for national homogeneity is very often also extended to the field of tourism resulting in the neglect of certain tourist attractions or in not explicitly attributing them to their originators, especially as regards more recent periods of history. Most obvious cases in this respect are the disregard of the Hungarian cultural heritage in Romania, of the Ottoman cultural heritage in Serbia and of not attributing the German cultural heritage to their originators in Slovenia. On the other hand we witness a lot of openness in this respect. Best practices can be observed in Poland related to the Hanseatic/Prussian/German as well as Jewish and Kashubian cultural heritage, in Czechia related to the (supra-national) Austrian cultural heritage, in Slovakia related to the German and Rusyn cultural heritage and not the least in Croatia related to the Venetian and Austrian cultural heritage. This resulted already in significant success on the tourism market by prompting additional demand and attracting a quality segment. This research is original because it relates national and regional tourism branding to a wider historical-political background. An added value results also from the comparative view over rather divergent countries.