Croatia Archive - Dark Tourism Blog

Dark Tourism & Shoes

This is the theme that came second in our latest poll. The winning theme, ‘DT & Shadows’, featured in the previous post, and in that I already announced that I would post the second ranked themes without a new poll. So now for ‘DT & Shoes’. By the way, I’m using “shoes” in a wide sense to include boots, trainers, stilettos, etc. as well as regular shoes.

What do you first think of when contemplating where shoes and dark tourism meet? For many people it will probably be this

6 July 2025 3 Comments

Dark Tourism & Beds

This is the theme that in the latest theme poll came second in the vote, and, as indicated in the winning theme’s post, I’ll now bring you the runner-up without a new poll.

Here’s a photo of one of the most gruesome places involving beds, namely a bed frame in a torture room of the infamous Tuol Sleng (aka S-21) prison in Phnom Penh in Cambodia. It was on beds like this that the decaying and ghastly mutilated bodies of the final victims of the Khmer Rouge were found by the liberators (the

14 February 2025 3 Comments

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

8 June 2024 1 Comment

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

25 May 2024 30 Comments

Islands of Dark Tourism

In this post I want to take you off the beaten track and to some less well explored, more exotic, remote locations. The eight selected places have only one thing in common: they are all islands. Other than that they are very different from each other and represent a range of distinct categories of dark tourism that dark globe trotters visit for very different reasons.

Of course there are well-known dark islands, too, such as Alcatraz or Robben Island, both former prison islands turned memorials, which today attract large numbers of visitors and hence overlap with mainstream tourism; but here we are going to get further away from that.

29 June 2022 3 Comments

Dark travel videos and a surprise change in Turkmenistan

Last week I was contacted by someone in the English department of the Franco-German co-operation TV channel ARTE. I was alerted to two series of short video productions (with episodes of between 5 to 8 minutes in length) on topics that include, or at least overlap with, dark tourism themes. (Find the links to the programmes below!)

The first one is called “Toxic Tour” and has six episodes, each about

29 March 2022 No Comments

Dark Tourism & Reflections

And here comes the third of the four themes of our most recent poll (which didn’t have a winner, hence all four are fielded). So now for reflections – and I mean that literally, mostly, though a little bit of reflecting in the figurative sense will also feature. But this is primarily a visual blog post.

I like photographing reflections! I’m always on the lookout for reflections wherever I travel. Hence I have loads of such photos that accumulated over the years. So the

13 October 2021 4 Comments

Dark Tourism & Furniture

And here comes the second of the themed posts (after last week’s “DT & hands”) that featured in our most recent poll, which didn’t have a clear result. So for this time I’ve picked furniture.

The photo below was taken at the DDR-Museum (‘GDR museum’) in Berlin and shows a reconstruction of the furnishings of a typical East German 1970s/early 80s living room – note in particular the

7 October 2021 No Comments

Tito

On this day, 41 years ago, on 4 May 1980, Josip Broz Tito died. He had been Yugoslavia’s socialist leader since the end of WWII. Tito famously fell out with Stalin and the Soviet Union and paved the way for the Non-Aligned Movement as a third way, taking neither the Eastern Bloc’s side nor the West’s side during the Cold War. Moreover he somehow held together a multi-ethnic Yugoslav federation, and

4 May 2021 No Comments

Dark Tourism & Broken Glass

Our latest theme poll had a clear winner so today I give you the requested one of broken glass (DT & bullet holes came second, and I may field that again in a future theme poll).

The photo above is what I consider one of the most appealing images of broken glass in my archives. It’s a close-up of a large war ruin I discovered in Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina, in 2009. Here’s a

23 February 2021 4 Comments

Dark Tourism & Stars and Stripes

This theme was not decided on by a poll, but just by myself, and the link to today’s significant date should be obvious.

But let’s start at the beginning. So, what kind of stars feature in dark tourism? For one thing there’s the old communist or Soviet five-pointed red star, like these:

3 November 2020 No Comments

Dark Tourism & Cars

As decided in the latest poll, the theme of this post is ‘dark tourism and cars’. It won by two votes ahead of ‘dark tourism and clothes’, so that will be entered again in the next poll. And since several people said that their second choice (and close contender) was ‘dark tourism and spheres’ I’ll give that another chance next time too. NPPs will have to wait a little longer, but as that is one of my personal favourites it is bound to pop up at some point as well (whether in another poll or independently I can’t say yet).

But now to cars. Searching through my archives I found

4 October 2020 2 Comments

Light at the End of Dark Tunnels

The idiomatic phrase ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ is probably being used a lot in these weird times– as something that is hoped for, the end of a crisis. Alas, with regard to the current pandemic, that light remains very faint at best, if it’s discernible at all. There’s still no cure, no vaccine, no clear outlook of what’s yet to come.
These thoughts inspired me to look through my photo archives searching for images of tunnels with lights at their ends, and indeed there have been some on my extensive travels. Here we go, the first one is

24 September 2020 No Comments

Balkan Belligerents

On this day, 29 years ago, on 25 June 1991, both Slovenia and Croatia declared themselves independent, marking the first proper secessions from the Yugoslav Federal state. This happened amidst rising tensions between different ethnicities and especially between Serbs and Croats, which eventually developed into war.

Slovenia got off comparatively lightly, with a military intervention by the Yugoslav army that lasted only 10 days and cost “only” 65 or so lives, before the country was reluctantly but effectively released into independence. The above photo shows a relic from that short war, namely a piece of wreckage of a Yugoslav helicopter that is on display in the generally excellent modern history museum in Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana.

In Croatia, on the other hand,

25 June 2020 No Comments

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