Q & A

Today, the abandoned city is a tourist hotspot. Travellers wearing hazmat suits follow tour guides through the overgrown streets.

In a gift shop at the edge of the exclusion zone, people queue to buy mugs and key rings bearing yellow hazard signs. Since this summer's HBO drama Chernobyl about the disaster, bookings went up by 40%.

Welcome to the world of dark tourism, defined by the Institute for Dark Tourism Research as visiting "sites of death, disaster, or the seemingly macabreGruesome or ghastly.".

Although booming, dark tourism is not new. For centuries, tourists have visited PompeiiA Roman town in Italy. It was buried under ash after a nearby volcano erupted. The ash preserved the town so well that today people can walk through the streets and into some buildings. to peer at bodies perfectly preserved by the volcanic blast. Today, cheap flights have improved access to sites of gore, disaster or even genocideThe annihilation of a people, either through killing of its members, or through the suppression of its culture..

Historians estimate that of the 1.3 million people sent to AuschwitzNazi death camp where over a million people lost their lives during WW2. concentration campA large prison for people held without legal justification, such as political prisoners or persecuted minorities. The first concentration camps were built by British colonial rulers in South Africa, but the term is most associated with Nazi camps, some of which were used to execute Jewish and other inmates as well as to imprison them. by the NazisA German political party of the twentieth century, led by Adolf Hitler. The Nazis controlled Germany from the early 1930s until the end of World War II., 1.1 million died.

Over two million people visited the site in 2018. Despite the mass attendance, visitors describe it as a place of solemnity and reflection.

But social media has complicated matters. Officials at Auschwitz have been forced to warn tourists against taking selfies on the camp's infamous railway tracks. A similar ban has been put in place at the 9/11A series of terrorist attacks that took place in the USA on 11 September 2001. It is known as 9/11 as Americans write the month first, and then the date. The attacks killed 2,996 people. Many of them died when two planes were hijacked and hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, causing them to collapse. memorial in New York.

Most agree that an acceptable length of time should pass before a sensitive site can become a tourist attraction.

In the days after 72 people burned to death in Grenfell Tower, posters began to appear in the local area reading: "Grenfell: A tragedy not a tourist attraction". Tourists had been congregating to take pictures of the burned-out structure.

At the other end of the spectrum, historian Mary Beard points out, "Tragedies of the distant past tend not to move us." Few of us mourn at the Tower of London, despite centuries of executions, or empathise with the gladiators of Rome's ColosseumA vast stadium built by the Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus. It could seat between 50,000 and 80,000 spectators. It was used to hold gladiatorial contests and even mock sea battles..

Dark tourists say the industry can help communities to rebuild after atrocity.

In the Dangrek Mountains of northern CambodiaA country in South East Asia bordered by Thailand, Vietnam and Laos., officials are launching a project to transform the last stronghold of the Khmer RougeA murderous left-wing political party which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. into a tourist spot. They hope it will attract investment to one of the country's poorest regions, and help Cambodia reckon with its past.

Dark tourist Peter Hohenhaus says that travellers are trying to reckon with their own mortality. "What we're looking at is ourselves," he explains. "That could have been us." Is this empathyThe capacity to understand and feel the suffering of others., or
schadenfreudeLiterally means "harm-joy". Schadenfreude is a German word that describes someone deriving pleasure from another's misfortune.? Are we leering at suffering for our own morbid gratification?

But tourists say they visit to educate themselves and pay respects to those who died. Wouldn't it be far worse to forget these horrors, as the Soviet UnionOfficially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). A powerful group of communist republics, the biggest being Russia, that existed from 1922 to 1991. erased the victims of the gulagsForced labour camps established by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, housing both small-time criminals and political prisoners.?

What do we know? Since the series Chernobyl premiered in May, visitor bookings to the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster have risen by 40%. The catastrophe occurred when the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant received a huge power increase. While around 40 people died in the initial explosion and the days immediately afterwards, thousands more are estimated to have since died from health problems caused by radiation.

What do we not know? If dark tourism is even a helpful term to use. The term was first coined in the 1990s. Perhaps it's a mistake to group the solemn memorial at Auschwitz with the profit-driven gift shop at Chernobyl, which attempts to thrill visitors with the threat of danger.