![]() ![]() ![]() “Quite often the intention of the visitor is to learn about atrocity or a dark heritage in a useful way, and it could be a reflection on what went wrong in the past and what lessons they can learn from the future so that mistakes aren’t repeated again,” says Johnston. Most tourists behave respectfully, he clarifies.Ĭhernobyl suddenly becomes visitor hotspot There are also thrill seekers going for “fun,” says Johnston – and a small group might have a morbid interest. ![]() Some visitors are there just because they’re on vacation in the area, others pursue a historical passion. Tony Johnston, head of Tourism at Althone Institute of Technology in Ireland, says motivations for visiting these places vary from individual to individual, and from site to site. “It’s not as new as it may seem,” says Peter Hohenhaus, who chronicles his experiences visiting dark tourism sites on his website,. Pompeii, the Roman city destroyed by a volcano eruption in AD79, has been on the tourist trail since the 1700s, and is still one of Italy’s most-visited destinations. The concept’s also sometimes called thanatourism, – from the Greek word thanatos, meaning death, or grief tourism.īut visitors were traveling to sites associated with death and destruction way before the ’90s. That’s a relatively small increase in numbers, but seems to reflect a global trend.Īs international tourism skyrockets – in 2018, there were 1.4 billion international tourist arrivals – interest in dark tourism is also escalating.ĭark tourism as a term was coined in the 1990s, by scholars exploring why tourists visited sites associated with the assassination of President John F. Some 2.15 million people visited Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland in 2018, roughly 50,000 more than the previous year. “After the show, I started to watch a lot of documentaries to find out more about what happened in Chernobyl, and I found out there are tours and you can come over,” one recent visitor, Edgars Boitmanis, from Latvia, tells CNN.Ĭhernobyl isn’t the only site of suffering that’s topping “must-visit” lists. Courtesy Nigel WalsheĬhernobyl and Pripyat have been on the dark tourism map since the radioactive Exclusion Zone surrounding them opened up to visitors in 2011, but – prompted in part by the launch of popular HBO mini series “Chernobyl” – travel interest in the Ukrainian site has grown considerably in recent weeks, according to tour operators. The volunteers began treating and sterilizing the dogs around the same time that construction began for the new safe confinement facility for the nuclear reactor that failed, and there was concern that the dogs living in the area may be a problem, Mousseau said.The abandoned city of Pripyat has become a popular place to visit and photograph. Researchers used preserved blood samples collected from more than 300 between 20 in locations with varying levels of contamination by the Chernobyl Dog Research Initiative as the organization has been providing veterinary care, according to the study. The radioactive contamination devastated wildlife populations in the region, but some survived and continued to breed. The dogs still living around the exclusion zone are likely descendants of pets left behind after residents surrounding the Chernobyl power plant fled the region in a hurry, leaving behind all their belongings, including their four-legged companions, Tim Mousseau, a professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina, told ABC News. ![]()
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