Authors

Discussion

Popular uses of the past in tourism serve destination development and branding as well as identity formation projects. Countries experiencing difficult state building processes often use the tourism industry to negotiate and project identity conceptualizations. This has been particularly true for countries in South-East and Eastern Europe. The Republic of Moldova is a case-in-point and lends itself to thorough observations. Since seceding from the Soviet Union and gaining independent and sovereign statehood in 1991, the country has established itself as a minor tourist destination in a very competitive European market. Lacking outstanding and prominent attractions, Moldova’s unspoiled nature as well as its historical and cultural heritage have become mainstays of destination development. At the same time, the country has undergone difficult state-building efforts, experiencing virulent nation formation processes in their wake. Owing to its multi-ethnic demographics and three decades of diverging political aspirations among its population as well as a difficult location in Russia’s Near Abroad, politics of identity and history have been contested. Since having been assigned EU candidate status in June of 2022, the European dimension has become even more central to nation formation. These developments have impacted destination development, too. Besides the much-needed tourism revenues, the industry has provided a space for the negotiation of identity conceptualizations and their mediation to overseas visitors. For three decades, tourist use of history has been shown to reflect identity discourses to varying degrees, oftentimes depending on the current politics of history and identity and the political set-up in its capital Chişinău. In three decades of sovereign statehood, the tourist use of the past has reflected – to varying degrees – discourses of a Moldovanist civic nationhood, based around remnants of the medieval principality of Moldavia, which have been developed as tourist sights. Tourist historiography has also reflected the discursive negotiation of Romanianism, an ethno-cultural discourse of national identity, with contrived attempts to link the territory of present-day Moldova to the Roman Empire and thus negate an individual identity or nationhood. Beside these two main discourses, separatist political aspirations have led to the emergence of a Transnistrian discourse of identity which is orientated towards the Russkji Mir, i. e. the Slavic-Russian, Christian Orthodox space, and also to the emergence of a Gagauz discourse of identity, which – in tourist historiography – presents itself as a proto-national discourse providing validity to the claim of a separate Gagauz ethnicity of Christian-Orthodox denomination, but otherwise Turkic heritage.