Austro-Hungarian heritage and tourism discourses in Pula, Croatia

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper analyses visual and textual representations of Austro-Hungarian heritage on the website of the tourist board of the town of Pula (Croatia), in the north-eastern Adriatic region of Istria, and the role of this heritage as a symbolic resource for constructing a tourist-oriented urban identity. Analysing the way heritage is represented and mobilised in tourist-oriented discourses can reveal certain ideological positions related to local, regional or broader political, social and cultural values and identifications. In spite of a strong tendency in the dominant narrative of Croatian national history of representing Austria-Hungary as a despotic empire which suppressed the rights of newly self-conscious nations, this period is now being re-evaluated in a more positive light. Results show that this heritage is mainly associated with ideas of ‘Europeanness’, ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘modernity’ and ‘urbanity’, with a distinctive lack of references to the political conflict and socioeconomic issues of the period. This is interpreted in the context of a post-socialist re-orientation toward Western Europe and a ‘nesting orientalist’ distancing from the negatively connoted Balkans and (South-) Eastern Europe.