Tourism in Bela Crkva: Fresh answers to the old questions

Abstract

This paper discusses several tourists’ attraction/manifestations in Bela Crkva, Banat, and the relationship between the events, local community and wider social influences. The paper focuses especially on the three events: Hunting Besi - a traditional fishing of the mythological catfish in the city’s lake, that has started in the 19080’s; Flower carnival- a renewed tourist manifestation, started in the 1990’s, originated from the religious ceremonies in the 19th century; and Bela Crkva in apples, a tourist and industrial manifestation, started in the first decade of the 21st century. These manifestations have started successively, covering the periods of pre-transition, “war-transition” during the fall of the former Yugoslavia and the contemporary transitional processes in Serbia. The organizational design of these events indicate that the participants of various backgrounds have tried to discontinue the socialist heritage in the domain of sustainable economy, and in this way, to post new measures for a different kind of distribution of the social authority. Hence, the tourism in Bela Crkva, at least in the past decades, has become one of the instruments for the community sustainable development in various social and economic environments, but also one of the pillars for reconstruction and new ways of defining of the layered identity. An analysis of societal change is thus possible, through researching tourist models: these changes are reflected in symbolic communicative exchange, included in these manifestations.