Uncomfortable Heritage & Dark Tourism at Chernobyl

Title: Uncomfortable Heritage & Dark Tourism at Chernobyl

Author: Jose Ramon Perez

Reference: A Reader in Uncomfortable Heritage and Dark Tourism., Edited by Sam Merrill and Leo Schmidt, Department of Architectural Conservation at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus, 2008-2009

Keywords: memory, essay

Abstract: [Between October 2008 and March 2009 the Department of Architectural Conservation at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus, hosted a study project entitled “Dark Tourism and Uncomfortable Heritage”. It aimed to build on the recent development of the sub-discipline of Dark Tourism Studies and extend the growing and current emphasis of uncomfortable, difficult or sensitive heritage sites within the discipline of Heritage Studies. …From the essay: ‘The first time I ever heard the name Chernobyl I was 14 years old. As a boy growing up in Mexico, I never heard much of the news from the USSR, let alone Ukraine. It was in a short verse by one of my favorite singer-songwriters. He wrote “dark like the sky of Chernobyl”, among two dozen other verses, making grim comparisons to an out-of-love situation. Doing some research, I learned that the event at Chernobyl had been a terrible explosion in a nuclear power station, with widespread, long-lasting and most appalling consequences…’]

URL: http://www.urbain-trop-urbain.fr/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/UHDT_Reader-allege.pdf#page=32