Dark Tourism: the macabre side of tourism

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Hiroshima

Dark tourism’ is a fairly new concept, and one that not many people will find enjoyable. It is also called ‘grief tourism’, which sounds even worse than the other name. As you might suspect by now, the objects of dark tourism are not the usual fun, happy and vibrant locations that you’d normally expect to visit, but quite the opposite.

Dark tourism deals with sites where terrible things have happened more or less recently in history. It’s certainly macabre, but at the same time, educational and illuminating. Sites where people (usually a large number of them) have inflicted violence or been on the receiving end of it, offer some interesting information about these historical events.

Cambodia’s killing fields

The Killing Fields are the sites where most of the 200,000 victims of the Khmer Rouge were buried in mass graves. Choeung Ek, a former orchard (of all things) is the most famous of these sites. 17,000 people were killed between 1975-1979 in Choeung Ek, and they are commemorated by a stupa with glass walls, filled with over 5000 human skulls.

The opened mass graves can also be seen, and bones are still let over in some of them, and after heavy rainfalls, more bones and clothing that belonged to the victims are sometimes found.

Chernobyl, Ukraine

You might not believe it, but the site of the worst nuclear disaster of the past 50 years can actually be visited. You can not only visit the town, but also the exclusion zone, that is, the 30 km radius area surrounding the reactors. None of them are functioning anymore, thankfully, and while some isotopes are still lingering the the air, the radiation levels are not dangerous for short durations.

The visit can only be described as unnerving, especially if you think about all those abandoned buildings (you can visit a maternity with most of the equipment still inside, or a school where school books are still littering the desks).

Murambi Technical School, Rwanda

Murambi Technical School is known today as the Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre, a museum for the victims of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. 65,000 Tutsis took shelter in the school, and after a few days they were overrun by Hutu militia, who murdered 45,000 people on April 16. Most of the survivors who managed to escape were killed the next day.

Men, women and children were massacred without discrimination, and the museum now serves as a reminder of this terrible event. The skeletons and mummified bodies of many of the victims can be seen at the museum.

Hiroshima, Japan

Many people go to Hiroshima for completely different reasons that the utter destruction of the city during WW2 and the death of millions of people. The Peace Memorial Park used to be a portion of the Nakajima district, which was completely obliterated by the bomb. The A-Bomb Dome is one of the few remaining structures which survived (in a severely deteriorated way), and also the most poignant symbol of the event.

The Children’s Peace Memorial and the Memorial Tower to the Mobilized Students are the most touching and emotionally-charged monuments in the park.

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