Dark Tourism BLOG
This page is intended to provide a more flexible and also more interactive element to dark-tourism.com, which is otherwise more static (more like an encyclopedia). The idea came about after the DT page I used to curate on Facebook was suddenly shut down by the company (full story here). So I’m continuing here – with regular blog posts, either featuring particular dark-tourism destinations or marking specific days in dark history and sometimes reacting to current affairs that are in some way relevant to this site’s topic.
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Dark Tourism & Graffiti
This is the theme that in the latest poll, as at the bottom of this post, narrowly came second, beaten by just one vote by DT & Bullet Holes, which became the previous Blog post. As I would have voted for Graffiti myself I then decided to compose and post this now without another poll. But I won’t let themed polls become forgotten again. There’ll be new ones before too long. Promise.
So now to this post’s theme of DT & Graffiti – but first I have to
Dark Tourism and Bullet Holes
This is the winning theme from the latest poll (see previous Blog post), which is also the one that had come second in the poll before that (see this post) and was thus eligible for another chance. And it narrowly took it.
An especially famous bullet hole is one of the dark star attractions at the Military History Museum here in Vienna (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum – HGM): it’s in the bloodied uniform worn by Archduke Franz Ferdinand when he was assassinated at the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo in 1914 (which was the trigger for WW1) – the bullet hole just below the collar is marked with a little arrow
Dark Tourism & Beaches
This is the winning theme of the poll at the bottom of the previous Blog post: beaches (won with a two-thirds majority!). Now, as I remarked below the poll, beach holidays are of course more or less the opposite of dark tourism, and I for one despise them. I was dragged along to beaches as a child and I put up with it, but as soon as I was old enough to choose my own travel destinations, beaches have never been much on my radar. That is: holiday beaches, beach resorts, that sort of thing. The reason: beaches packed with people are an absolute horror for me. For example, to
Dark Tourism & Doors
This time I’d like to revive a tradition that somehow got lost on this Blog over two years ago (well, they’ve been two quite troubled years, so maybe that explains it). What I mean is the “themed posts” we used to have on here quite regularly between mid-2020 and until early 2022. These themes added an often unexpected and occasionally even light-hearted angle to the topic of dark tourism. Today I’ll pick up that tradition again and give you a similar post – now one that is all about doors. And as before this will mostly be a photo essay.
How can doors be dark? Well, the first thing
Krakow in Winter
As Europe is heading into summer, and before long quite probably into another series of heatwaves, I thought I’d post something about my visit to the great city of Krakow, Poland, where I was in mid-January, i.e. in the depths of the southern Polish winter.
After visiting Auschwitz I also had a few days in Krakow itself and managed to fill a number of significant gaps in terms of dark tourism that I’ll present in the course of this Blog post.
The biggest of these gaps was probably the
Hamburg & Berlin revisited
Around the Easter period I travelled to northern Germany once again. Primarily this was to visit family and to see to some bureaucratic things that needed doing. But I also managed to squeeze in a touch of dark tourism here and there.
Hamburg is the city I was born in and where I grew up (mostly), went to school and studied. Since I left in the mid-1990s I’ve been back numerous times, yet there still remained things I had never managed to slot in before. One thing I had long wanted to do was going back to my former primary school in Hamburg on Kielortallee. When I