The tour guide as heritage producer : socialist sites in Bucharest and Sofia

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The Tour Guide as Heritage Producer

Eline Splinter (6142982)

elinesplinter@gmail.com

18 August 2017

Master Thesis Urban Studies

Supervisor: Olga Sezneva

Second reader: Virginie Mamadouh

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1. Introduction

The socialist regimes in Eastern Europe have left a significant mark on the urban landscape, through its grand urban designs, impressive monuments and statues, prestigious buildings, and large-scale apartment blocks. Derived from their ideological meanings after the events of 1989, these concrete legacies of socialism have become subjected to complex processes of transformation in both material and symbolic sense (e.g. Czepczyński, 2008). Much scholarly work has concerned itself with these processes, showing how the post-socialist states have strived to distance themselves from the socialist past in their desire to confirm their new national identities. This has resulted in a situation in which many of the socialist sites have been demolished, stripped from its meaning or left to decay (Light & Young, 2010). Although these processes are by no means straightforward, in general these sites have been devaluated and are not considered worth preserving. Yet, in recent years there have been observed instances that indicate that the socialist sites are re-valued in new and more appreciative ways: residents have protested the demolishment of buildings and monuments, new museums about the socialist past have been established, and there has been developed a EU-funded cultural route on socialist architecture throughout the region. These examples suggest that there is increased attention for the remembering of the socialist past and the use and preservation of its built forms.

This study is concerned with one of these phenomena that seem to indicate a re-evaluation and use of the socialist built sites, namely communist-themed walking tours. Over the last years, such tours have emerged throughout a broad range of (capital) cities in Eastern Europe. Walking or driving tourists along and through these cities’ socialist spaces, the tour guides promise to tell their audiences the real story of life during the socialist period. Rather than downplaying the socialist past, these tour guides deliberately enlarge and exaggerate associations with communism. This seems to suggests that the cities’ socialist landscapes do have value and are worth preserving – at least according to some. Thus far, however, there is little known about how exactly meaning is ascribed to socialist sites in a post-socialist context.

This study strives to get an in-depth understanding of how sites might become valued in new ways by using a heritage perspective. Over the last decades, the field of critical heritage studies has mostly concerned itself with scrutinising the way in which statist and other powerful actors have been involved in the production of heritage for political and economic purposes (Graham, Ashworth & Tunbridge, 2000). However, recent work has increasingly recognised that heritage can only be understood by taking into account a broader variety of actors, including residents and tourists (Waterton & Watson, 2015). This has been accompanied by a shift in which, rather than focusing only on officialised discourse, heritage is understood as being produced on a day-to-day basis, recognizing its performative, affective and emplaced dimensions (Haldrup & Boerenholdt 2015; Crouch 2015; Fennell 2012; Muehleback 2017).

This study contributes to this emerging field of research by exploring the ways in which urban socialist sites – i.e. architecture, urban design, monuments, and so forth – are valued, used and heritageised through communist-themed guided city tours in Sofia (Bulgaria) and Bucharest (Romania). The overarching research question is as follows:

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4 How do communist-themed guided tours in Sofia and Bucharest participate in, and contribute to, the production of an emerging type of built socialist heritage?

Further, it should be emphasised that within this broader research question particular attention will be paid to the role of the tour guide. Indeed, adopting an understanding of heritage as socially constructed, the question of what becomes heritageised and how is ultimately linked to the question of whom is heritageising it.

The study has an exploratory nature and follows a qualitative strategy. To uncover the subtle ways in which meaning is ascribed to socialist sites, the research will look at how heritageisation takes place in practice, that is, during the tours. The study focuses on the guides’ discourse and practices, and, importantly, how these take shape within the urban environment. Data has been collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with tour guides, as well as by joining a range of communist-themed tours as a participant. The data has been analysed by using discourse analysis, while also taking account of the material properties and performativity of sites. This research aims to contribute to the existing literature in two main ways. First, as noted above, it contributes to an emerging field that considers how heritage is produced by a broad variety of actors through both discourse and practices. More particularly, the study looks at the practices of an actor that has so far remained unexplored in the study of heritageisation: the tour guide. Second, the study adds to the literature on how meaning is ascribed to socialist sites in a post-socialist context. The remainder of this study consists of the following. First, chapter 2 will develop a processual and socially constructed understanding of heritage and then set out the political, economic and social functions of heritage. Thereafter, chapter 3 will give an overview of the methodology and methods used in this research. This is followed by chapter 4 which provides an introduction to the case study locations Bucharest and Sofia. Then, chapter 5 focuses on the role of tour guides in developing such tours, while chapter 6 will discuss more in-depth how socialist sites are heritageised during the tours. The concluding chapter provides an overarching answer to the research question and highlights some directions for future research.

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2. Literature review

2.1 The social construction of heritage

Over the last century or so, and particularly in the last decades, there has been witnessed an increased interest in the past and its heritage, which is evident both in a growing body of scholarly work and in the emergence and expansion of a broad range of museums, heritage sites, monuments, memorials, art installations and performances that are aimed to remember the past (Macdonald, 2013). Scholars have explained this ‘obsession with the past’ as a modern phenomenon, that is particularly associated with the formation of nation states. Heritage, as part of a wider concern with the past, helped to generate national identity and provide a sense of continuity - thereby legitimising and naturalising the state’s very existence (Graham et al., 2000). The British Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882 is often seen as a pivotal moment, marking one of the earliest legal implementations on the preservation of the built environment (Harvey, 2001). The more recent ‘heritage boom’ that has been taking place since the 1980s has particularly been understood in relation to the restructuring of the global economy, with heritage being used as a tool for place marketing (Hewison, 1987; Graham et al., 2000).

The understanding of what is heritage has significantly broadened over the years, making it now a fairly fluid concept that cannot be easily demarcated. The heritage movement as it emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century initially understood heritage as something that could be identified objectively. The acts and programmes that were implemented to preserve sites decided what to enlist on the basis of their age, their aesthetics and its scientific significance (Graham et al., 2000). From the 1980s onwards, however, the idea that objects have some sort of intrinsic value became increasingly challenged when social scientists started to explore the context of heritage (Waterton & Watson, 2015). An emerging field of critical heritage studies increasingly scrutinised the cultural and ideological ‘work’ that heritage does, thereby revealing how it not only reflects but also reinforces power relations (Waterton & Watson, 2015). The recognition that heritage is political and constructed has opened-up the concept in terms of scale and ontology, in academia and, to a lesser extent, also in professional circles (Harvey, 2015). Heritage has become increasingly concerned with local and social, rather than material, significance. As such, research has focused on forms of subaltern heritage of indigenous sites (Smith, 2006) as well as the heritageisation of a broad range of ‘places of pain and shame’ (Logan & Reeves, 2009). Even more recently, the field of heritage studies has increasingly urged for the study of the ordinary and the everyday, understanding heritage as lived experience and performance. Themes explored are as diverse as the modernist or social housing estate (Nymoen Rørtveit & Setten, 2015; Pendlebury, Townshend & Gilroy, 2009), the buildings of underground techno-clubs (Schofield & Rellensmann, 2015) and the experience of heritage through urban exploration (Arbodela, 2016). The crucial point is thus that heritage means different things to different people, and additionally, that a broad variety of actors – professionals, citizens, tourists, tour guides, and so on – are continuously involved in processes of (co-)producing heritage. Before continuing our discussion on what heritage is, it should be emphasised that this study is concerned with built forms of heritage and thus excludes notions such as music heritage or literary heritage. As the above has suggested, however, this does not mean that the focus is solely on material qualities. Rather, it takes the built environment as its starting point, and

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6 from there studies the way in which meaning is ascribed to particular sites – and as such, how these are heritageised. Moreover, it is important to note that, even though this study positions itself within the heritage debate, this does not mean that it only understands something as heritage when actors explicitly frame it in heritage terms. Doing so would have significant limitations as people often think about heritage in the way it has been defined by the nation-state (see Smith 2006). Indeed, the aim of this study is precisely to study the way in which sites might become heritageised outside of dominant or institutionalised understandings.

Having said that, how can we delineate what is heritage? The temporality of heritage is of central importance: heritage refers to the past, yet, it acquires its meaning through the present. Moreover, heritage is about what should be preserved and thus also makes a claim about an imagined, or desired, future (Tunbridge & Ashworth, 1996). Heritage is thus mostly about the present, as reflected in the simple but widely used definition of heritage as being the “contemporary usage of a past” (Ashworth & Tunbridge, 1999, p.105). Placing heritage in the present, we can understand the process through which a particular site suddenly becomes highlighted as significant and worthy of preservation, or the other way around, loses its significance. Rather than speaking about heritage, it is thus more accurate to talk about heritageisation (or de-heritageisation).

How such processes take shape is then very much dependent on the actors that are driving them, and the objectives and interests they have. Indeed, the way in which heritageisation takes places and the functions that heritage serves are very much linked to existing power relations in society. Heritage is about selection: of course, the selection of sites, but also of memories and a range of events, myths and other intangible aspects with whom the site is, or becomes, associated. The way in which the state has institutionalised ‘national’ forms of heritage is the most obvious example, and this will be more elaborately discussed in section 2.3. Yet, the selectivity of heritageisation also implicates that the “shaping of any heritage product is by definition prone to disinherit non-participating social, ethnic or regional groups, as their distinctive historical experiences may be discounted, marginalised, distorted or ignored” (Tunbridge & Ashworth, 1996, p.29). Such dominant representations are, of course, continuously contested by other groups that have different interpretations or make different claims to it. Such dissonance can be inflicted by dimensions such as nationality, ethnicity, religion, class and gender (Tunbridge & Ashworth, 1996). The question of what is heritage thus ultimately becomes a question of whose heritage it is.

Yet, how can we study and understand such processes? The work of Eyal (2004) is helpful here, in which he argues that there is nothing straightforward about memory per se, but that instead it is always based on an understanding of what it is “good for, how it should be used, [and] what it should do for the collective or individual subject” (p.6, emphasis in original). Although his work does not concern heritage per se, we can understand heritage as a particular form of memory – one in which the need to remember is materialised in the need to preserve. Hence, we can adapt Eyal’s (2004) idea of the “will to memory” to study the “will to heritageise.” In order to study this process, Eyal (2004) has identified four analytical dimensions: the injunction to remember, the mnemonic substance; the mnemonic operation; and the interpretation of the goal or function of memory. First, the injunction to remember refers to the way in which “memory is suddenly highlighted as a problem and as something toward which the actor has a duty” (p.9). This injunction is often framed in terms of there being too little memory: something has been forgotten and needs to be remembered again.

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7 Concerning heritage more specifically, it can be added that this injunction can be found in the decay or destruction of particular sites - urging the actor to save them before they are lost forever. Second, the mnemomic substance refers to that part of the past which needs to be remembered. Heritage then, is concerned simultaneously with the selection of sites and the selection of events, stories, myths with whom the sites are or become associated (see Ashworth and Tunbridge 1996). Third, the mnemonic operation refers to the actual practices or techniques that are applied in the process of remembering, such as re-enactment, recollection practices, or archaeological research. Concerning heritageisation through guided tours, it can be added that used techniques might involve the broad ray of ways in which the urban environment is navigated or curated – which will be discussed more elaborately in section 2.5. Fourth and finally, then, we have the goal or function that is prescribed to remembering, or in this case, heritageisation. As Eyal (2004) notes, one of the most important and most-often expressed purpose is the preservation of collective identity over time. Indeed, heritage studies has also been primarily been concerned with the ways in which heritageisation is used as a means to reinforce shared identities and collective memories. Besides that, however, heritage is also often formulated through economic purposes (e.g. Graham et al., 2000). These different functions of heritageisation will be elaborately discussed in the following sections.

Adopting such a social constructivist and processual approach to heritage is particularly appropriate for this study as it is concerned with the changing meanings that are ascribed to the built environment. Even though all heritage is constantly undergoing processes of re-construction and contestation, most often heritage finds itself in a relatively stable situation: its significance is accepted and normalised. Yet, there are also many cases in which the heritage-status of a site is unstable and undecided. This is most certainly the case with regard to the socialist sites throughout Eastern Europe, in which many have been the centre of heated societal debates over the last decades. The question if they should be valued, and if so, how, is an undecided and contested one. Hence, the next section will briefly set out the properties of socialist sites and the trajectories they have been subjected to until present day.

2.2 The legacies of socialism: An undecided heritage?

Since the establishment of the People’s Republics after the Second World War until their fall, their socialist regimes have strongly influenced the urban landscape. To some extent this is of course the case with any type of governing power, but this was even more the case for these regimes as they heavily and centrally controlled architecture and urban planning, and, equally important, understood the built environment as an important instrument to create the ideal communist man and society (Czepczyński, 2008). Hence, in the course of over four decades of socialism, (new) cities were modelled to socialist urban planning, new architectures were constructed, and new monuments erected to honour the new socialist leaders and the Soviet Army. Despite their common adhering to communism, the forms and appearances of socialist landscapes are variegated. For one thing, Czepczyński (2008) notes that the socialist landscape has two faces, reflecting the wedge between communism as an ideology and communism as a totalitarian regime. Moreover, the changing political context over time as well as the national specificities resulted in a variation of socialist architecture. From the early post-war years, we can find Stalinist architecture, also referred to as socialist classicism in many of the republics, which combined styles such as Russian baroque and gothic, and became in later years also associated with its American-inspired high-rises (Czepczyński, 2008). After the Thaw, there was plead for a new architectural style

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8 that was humbler and would reflect and express the ideal of the classless society. Further, the late years of socialism also resulted in more freedom and therefore more variations in style. Despite all of these variations, the socialist regimes thus left a powerful legacy in the urban landscape, both physically and symbolically.

Following the domino-like collapse of the socialist regimes in 1989, popular sentiments focused on the idea of leaving behind the immediate past and to start afresh, from the year zero. Striving to facilitate integration with western Europe, these states distanced themselves from the immediate past to confirm their status as post-socialist states (Light, 2001). The politics of erasure was applied in many facets of society, but was perhaps most visible in the transformation of the urban landscape (Diener & Hagen, 2013). Indeed, the immediate response after the revolutions was an extensive removal and/or destruction of those statues, monuments and other signifiers that most strongly symbolised the former socialist regimes, particularly so in the cities’ most central areas. Moreover, emblems, logos, inscriptions and coats of arms were stripped off the urban landscape and replaced by symbols of crowns and other ‘appropriate’ historical references (Czepczyński, 2008; Light, 2004). Although there were many debates and plans to also demolish buildings, these were seldom destroyed due the costs that destruction would bring along. Stripped from their name and iconography, these buildings were normally re-used and re-defined. Overall, thus, the socialist built remains were very much unwanted, representing something that had no meaning anymore. As this urge to erase quickly cooled down, much of the socialist sites can still be found throughout these cities landscapes. Yet, a large share of what still stands has been neglected for over 25 years, and is sometimes slowly crumbling down.

Yet, the perception towards those remainders seems to have shifted: there are numerous examples that indicate that the socialist past and its left-over sites are increasingly appreciated and used in new ways. On the one hand, some of the most prominent socialist sites have become the subject of heated debate. For example, the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw has been the subject of heated debate several times, but has now established itself as an important landmark in the urban landscape (Murzyn, 2008). Another recent example is the case of the extraordinary Pyramid in Tirana, built as a mausoleum for Albanian communist leader Hoxha. This building has been strongly neglected and as such has deteriorated over the years, yet, the plans to demolish it resulted in big urban demonstrations (Nikolli, 2012). On the other hand, and to some extent overlapping with the above, over the years new museums on the socialist past. Also in Tirana, the cultural centre and museum on socialism BUNK'ART opened in 2016, making accessible to the public one of the biggest bunkers stemming from the socialist period. Moreover, in Sofia the Museum on Socialist Art opened in 2012, including an garden in which the de-pedestaled statues are exhibited (Guentcheva, 2012). The municipality of Krakow even started promoting its outer-city socialist-built district Nowa Huta as a tourist destination (City of Krakow, n.d.). On a different scale and level of organisation, in 2014 the Council of Europe added a new Cultural Route focusing on both fascist and communist in ten different countries: the ATRIUM-route, short for ‘Architecture of Totalitarian Regimes of the XX Century in Urban Management’ (Leech, 2016).

Although such examples are too fragmented and incidental to speak about a general trend, they do show that something is changing. Following the definition of heritage as the “contemporary use of the past,” the newly opened museums quite clearly illustrate how socialist sites and its remains can be qualified as heritage – at least, by some actors. The

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9 very existence of the communist-themed tours that are the subject of this study also implicate that socialist sites are ‘used,’ and as such, valued in particular ways. Yet, how these sites are valued is less clear, which is what this study aims to understand. Hence, the remainder of this chapter will focus on the explanations that have been offered for processes of heritageisation. Section 2.3 will focus on how the state and affiliated organisation have engaged in heritageisation for political and economic ends, and thereafter section 2.4 will shed light on the way in which other actors, mostly residents, have used heritage for social purposes. After having reached an understanding of these different meanings and purposes heritage can have, section 2.5 will discuss the role of the tour guide in processes of heritageisation.

2.3 The institutionalisation of heritage: Power and economy

As noted in section 2.1, from the 1980s onward scholars have increasingly started to scrutinise the ways in which heritage has become institutionalised. The following will built on this line of work and show how the nation-state, local authorities and global institutions are driving heritageisation processes, informed by political and economic objectives. The last part of this section will more particularly zoom in on Eastern Europe, and discuss the way in which authorities have (and have not) been engaged with the heritageisation of socialist sites.

When thinking about heritage, we almost cannot help to think of the nation. We have ‘our’ national museums, national pasts, and national heritage sites, which are all largely regulated by national bodies, policies and financial subsidies. As Graham et al. (2000, p.12) note, in most countries heritage has become a “near-monopoly of national governments.” Indeed, our contemporary understanding of heritage has been traced back to the beginning of the formation of nation-states and is, in fact, believed to have been developing in tandem with it (Graham et al., 2000). As heritage enabled the ‘discovery’ of national identity, it worked to confirm the idea of a homogeneous group of people located in a territorial state (e.g. Graham et al., 2000). By expressing a sense of past and continuity, national heritage helped to naturalise and legitimise national regimes (e.g. Macdonald, 2013). It should be noted that this close association between heritage and the nation does not mean that heritage is a completely modern invention: to the contrary, heritage has always been an important resource for (as well as an effect of) power in any kind of society (Harvey, 2001). Rather, the shift towards a modern society and the formation of nation-states brought along a particular understanding of heritage, which became more formalised and legalised (Harvey, 2001; Smith, 2006). Of course, the creation of a national heritage took place simultaneously with the development of a national history and with the establishment of national societies and scientific associations. Throughout this process, national heritage became slowly institutionalised through the increased legal protection of buildings, as well as the setting up of museums and galleries (Graham et al., 2000).

Scholars have extensively addressed the relationship between heritage and national identity, focusing on museums (e.g. Evans & Boswell, 1999; Fladmark, 2015), monuments (Johnson, 1995; Forest & Johnson, 2002) and commemoration more generally (e.g. Gillis, 1996) and other types of heritage sites (e.g. Mitchell, 2001; Waterton 2010). The substances of this emerging national heritage are, of course, place-specific, yet they generally built on notions of culture, ethnicity and religion of the dominant group. Considering the properties of the sites that have been qualified as heritage, Smith (2006) has argued that the dominant authorised

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10 discourse in Western societies “privileges monumentality and grand scale, innate artefact/site significance tied to time depth [and] scientific/aesthetic expert judgement” (p.11). Scholars have argued that this dominant interpretation can be traced back to the cultural tastes’ of the bourgeoisie, and is thus also very much class-based, but this will be discussed further in section 2.4. Overall, the focus on the nation and the monumental has excluded many sites that are important to ethnic, religious or other groups of minorities, and also the vernacular is generally excluded from these dominant interpretations.

The success of the heritage sector has been for a large part dependent on its ability to present itself as something exceeding beyond its presumed inherent (but actually socio-political) value by making heritage instrumental in the achievement of other policy objectives (Pendlebury, 2015). In particular, heritage (and culture more in general) has become strongly aligned to economic development (Graham et al., 2000). Not only is heritage an economic sector in itself, it has also become of crucial importance for local authorities in the creation of attractive and marketable place images (Pendlebury, 2015). This has been understood in relation to the broader shift towards the post-industrial society and the increased inter-city competition that has accompanied this, in which an unique city image is supposed to attract tourism, business and residents (Harvey, 1989; Evans, 2003). In addition to, and partly overlapping with, flagship developments, festivals and museums, one of the ways by which authorities have tried to generate economic revenue and realize urban revitalization is through heritageisation (Herzfeld, 2015; Moore, 2007; Ryberg-Webster & Kinahan, 2014). Heritage has somewhat of a special role within these processes, as its reference to the past results in the non-reproducibility of place. As Macdonald (2013, p.4) notes, “place distinctiveness seems to be increasingly marked by public reference to the past.”

However, scholars in the field of critical urban studies and critical heritage studies have emphasised that that the focus on the economic, rather than the social or cultural, significance of heritage has resulted in a form of heritage that is somehow reduced in meaning; that is less 'genuine' than before (e.g. McManus, 2005). By focusing on economic objectives and tourism, the official or promoted heritage product becomes sanitized and less related to the local residents and their place identities. For example, Graham (2002, p.1013) states that “heritage is reduced to little more than an adjunct to urban tourism and place marketing.” As Moore (2007) concludes, commodification can result in the ‘forgetting’ this part of local history (and thereby memory and identity) in favour of economic objectives. In addition to the way in which heritage has been used by national and local authorities, the wider transformations related to globalisation have also resulted in the ‘upscaling’ of organisations focusing of heritage. From a global level, there are two organisations that are of particular importance: the governmental organization ICOMOS that is an international network of heritage experts and practitioners, and the World Heritage Centre of UNESCO (see Smith 2006). Particularly well known and influential is UNESCO’s World Heritage List, that is based on the idea that there can be identified forms of heritage which have “universal significance." Although both ICOMOS and UNESCO have no legal power with regard to heritage per se, they are highly regarded and their recommendations and guide books are widely adopted in the practice of heritage worldwide. Much has been written about these organisations and their influence on the interpretation of heritage, but most influential and insightful has been the work of Smith (2006). She has argued how these organisations express and reinforce an ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ understanding of heritage that obscures how these organisations – for large part consisting of Western experts – are reinforcing

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11 Western hegemony. Further, another more recent example of the upscaling of heritage is the European Heritage Label that was established in 2013. The goal is clear: strengthening the sense of a European shared history and identity and as such naturalising and legitimising the post-national European project (see Craith, 2008).

The process of heritageisation is thus used in important ways by the state and other powerful actors in order to establish and reinforce particular identities and is also used more instrumentally to generate economic revenue. How can we apply these insights to post-socialist states of Eastern Europe? As we have seen in section 2.2, the collapse of socialism brought along a major identity crisis for the post-socialist states, whom in their transformation towards democratic capitalist states sought to disassociate themselves with the immediate past and facilitate integration with Western Europe (Light, 2001). Tourism fulfilled an important role within this process: besides being a means of generating much needed economic revenue, the emerging stream of tourists from Western Europe functioned as a way to express their newly created or desired post-socialist identities (e.g. Light, 2001; Kaneva & Popescu, 2011). This was particularly evident in the way in which states started to re-value and heritageise pre-socialist sites from the “Golden Ages,” thereby emphasising the historical and cultural connections with Western Europe (e.g. Young and Kaczmarek, 2008; Ashworth & Tunbrige, 1999).

Parallel to this, a process of the de-valuation of socialist sites have been taking place, in which the socialist concrete legacies were in many cases destroyed, removed, re-contextualized, or simply left to deteriorate (see section 2.2). Fair to say, these socialist sites have so far not been considered heritage. To a certain extent, however, this process was frustrated by the fact that many tourists were interested precisely in the socialist past and the socialist sites. Even though national and local governments might not have promoted their immediate past, the interest has been fuelled by commercial organizations in the tourist industry, for example through guidebooks and travel brochures (Light, 2000). Particularly when there were little other tourists sights on offer, governments have been forced to respond to the tourist appeal on socialist sites (Light, 2000).

Scholarly work has identified different strategies employed by authorities in order to heritageise socialist sites in such a way that their post-socialist identities are least compromised. One of the most important strategies has been to define the own role in this past as that of resistance and opposition, thus of anti-communism (Murzyn, 2008; Young & Kacmarek, 2008). This has been particularly evident in cities throughout Poland, where many plagues were put down and monuments erected to commemorate the victims of communism (Young & Kacmarek, 2008). The heritageisation that takes place in such a way is thus focused on positioning the nation and its people as the victims. Yet, this representation of opposition is not everywhere feasible. The work of Light (2000; 2001) has identified some other strategies. Discussing the current Parliament’s building in Bucharest, that can be seen as the city’s central socialist landmark, Light (2001) shows how the official representation neglects the context in which the building was constructed and instead focuses on material aspects such as the ‘craftmanship’ used in construction, the Romanian materials, and the sheer size and luxury of the building (see also section 4.3). Another study by Light (2000) has shown how socialist sites might be taken out of their context, which his has particularly happened with regard to statues that have been relocated to (outdoor) museums. Although such parks could be interpreted as a reflection of a more comfortable relation with the communist past, Light (2000) notes that it is “a way of remembering […] within tightly defined

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12 parameters.” Further, the socialist past might be distanced from the city in a literal, spatial sense. For example, Szobor Park is situated in the periphery of Budapest which makes sure that the visitor will not stumble upon it but has to make a purposeful visit, and thereby also disconnects it from Budapest’s urban identity (Light, 2000). The same could be said about the Berlin Wall, where almost all preserved fragments of the Wall are situated several kilometres from the city (Light, 2000), and about the recently opened Museum of Socialist Art in the outskirts of Sofia (see section 4.3).

Little has been written so far on the economic ways in which socialist sites might have been used by authorities, which reflects that indeed little of this sort is happening throughout the former Eastern Bloc. One of the rare cases in which the municipality has explicitly and deliberately used the socialist past to promote tourism and as such to revitalize the area is the socialist built district Nowa Huta in Krakow (City of Krakow, n.d.). Aligning to the work mentioned above, the authorities have represented this district both in relation to the pre-socialist past as well as the ultimate place of resistance. Another particularly interesting example is the project ATRIUM of the South East Europe Transnational Cooperation Programme (SEETCP) that was mentioned before, which aims to heritageise socialist sites for social, political and economic purposes. Indeed, one of the main purposes of this project is to interpret socialist architectures in a new way in order to “leave the framework of traumatic memory” (SEETCP, 2012, p.9) but is also supposed to reinforce a European identity as it should “help the contemporary understanding [of] Europe as a whole” (p.10). Moreover, ATRIUM has identified certain architectural heritages partly on the basis of its “possible economic valorisation” and sees the route as a means to attract tourism and generate economic growth (SEETCP, 2012). This projects shows the complexities of looking at the role of authorities in the heritageisation of socialist sites, as this is an intra-regional project which does not engage with national governments, but only with local authorities (Leech, 2016). Furthermore, this project aims to value the socialist sites not by recognising their social value per se, as there is a clear focus on monumentality and extraordinary pieces of architecture.

Overall, thus, the studies discussed above have shown the various strategies by which nation-states have attempted to deal with their socialist sites. Although this is and has been a rather ambiguous process, the tendency has been for nation-states to marginalize the socialist past and its associated sites. Moreover, this ambiguousness is further enhanced when taking into consideration the way in which EU-institutions as well as local authorities heritageise socialist sites for their own political and/or economic purposes. Either way, however, these occasions of producing a socialist heritage are very much driven by professional assessments based on architectural qualities.

2.4 The social meaning of heritage

The above has revealed how supposedly objective interpretations of heritage have been institutionalized in order to legitimize particular ideologies and reinforce the power of the political and economic elites, thereby marginalising possible other interpretations of heritage. Despite the insightfulness of this line of work, it reveals little about how heritageisation works in practice and what heritage means to people in their everyday life. For one thing, this already becomes clear when considering the background of the development of national heritage that has been discussed above. Those individuals or groups that were actually driving the preservation of a ‘national’ heritage of buildings and landscapes were for a large

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13 part located outside of the authorities: instead, they were citizens acting upon what they witnessed was the demise of a historic environment under influence of industrialisation and the accompanying processes of urbanization (Pendlebury, 2015; Graham et al., 2000). Uniting themselves in associations that sometimes turned out to become National Trusts, these elites’ lobbying efforts crystallised in the support of the authorities and accordingly the implementation of legislative protection (Graham et al., 2000). These citizens were part of an influential well-educated elite, which shows that the dominant values about heritage are in fact very much class-based in origin, rather than ‘national’ per se (Graham et al., 2000). Recent work in heritage studies has increasingly started to address how to better understand heritage as it is produced (and consumed) on an everyday basis. On the one hand, scholars have argued that one needs to take into account a broader variety of actors, including local residents and tourists (Waterton & Watson, 2015; Wu & Hou, 2015). On the other hand, there has been argued for a shift towards a ‘more-than-representational’ approach (see Waterton & Watson 2015) in which the production of heritage is not simply understood as determined by representational means such as text and semiotics but also focuses on dimensions of performativity (Haldrup & Boerenholdt, 2015) affect (Crouch, 2015) and emplacement (Fennell, 2012; Muehlebach, 2017).

Considering our earlier definition of heritage being the contemporary use of the past, what social uses and functions can heritageisation have for citizens? Much of the discussion on the social dimensions of remembering and heritageisation has been framed with regard to the idea of nostalgia, which refers to a certain feeling of longing towards (parts of) the past. Nostalgia can generally be understood as a reaction on quickly changing times and circumstances, and thereby, a sense of loss of what was there before (Boym, 2002). Nostalgia’s forms, however, are variegated. Boym (2002) makes a useful distinction between restorative and reflective forms of nostalgia. The former refers to those efforts of remembering the past that presume the truthful character of their reading of history – and as such does not recognize it as nostalgia as such. Restorative nostalgia is about continuity with the past, but in its realisations it “reduces this space of play with memorial signs to a single plot" (Boym, 2002, p.43) either by focusing on the idea of the restoration of origins or building upon conspiracy theory. Restorative nostalgia is often applied with regard to upheavals of nationalism, and is mostly associated with institutionalised forms of collective memory. The re-valuation, reconstruction and heritageisation of pre-socialist sites in post-socialist states, as discussed in the previous section, can be seen as restorative nostalgia. Contrasting this, reflective nostalgia is about the past "not [as] a duration but [as] a perfect snapshot" (p.49). This type of nostalgia does not attempt to 'recreate' or 'remake' the past, but emerges through defamiliarization and the distance between past and present (Boym, 2002). Hence, reflective nostalgia is "ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary" (p.50). This form of nostalgia is more about cultural and social memory, and is what we are most concerned with here. Although nostalgia is often used as “a bad word, an affectionate insult at best” (p.xiv), a broad range of literature has shown that nostalgia often reflects genuine processes of meaning-making.

A large part of the work on nostalgia has been discussed in the context of the de-industrialisation of Western societies over the course of the 20th_{century, and the range of}

economic and social transformations this has brought along. Similar to the elites that have been driving the heritage movement in the time of industrialisation described above, we can also see here that groups of residents ascribe social meanings to industrial sites that do not

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14 have a function anymore. Focusing on the former industrial town Sesto in Italy, Muehlebach (2017) has shown that the town’s residents have been involved in heritageisation processes not because of their material qualities per se, but because of the collective values that were generated within the industrial process. In the context of de-industrialisation, then, the production of heritage is just as much about preserving a sense of community and collective identity as it is about attempting to hold on to, and re-make, such a feeling of collectivity in the present (Muehlebach, 2017). A similar argument is made in a study by Smith (2006) on the former miner town Castleford in England. What is remarkable about this case, however, is that almost all of the industrial buildings had been already demolished at the time that a group of residents started to campaign for the preservation of that what was left. Their focus became to be on buildings that had little to no significant architectural value, but that were important places for communal interaction and networking. The social value attributed to those sites was then not only in its memory-value but also in its current use: for these residents, heritage was “very much about doing and not necessarily only or primarily having” (Smith, 2006, p.260, emphasis in original).

At the same time, as both Smith (2006) and Muehlebach (2017) argue, these processes of heritageisation also functioned as a critique or a “meta-commentary” on the contemporary societal circumstances, in particular focused on the high level of unemployment for the towns’ residents and the demise of social solidarity. The focus on solidarity can also exceed that of the local community, as becomes clear in Fennell’s (2012) study on development of the National Public Housing Museum, housed in a former public housing estate in Chicago. The sense of nostalgia towards the past is here also directed towards solidarity, although in this case formulated in the context of the demise of the social welfare state. The initiators of this museum aimed to create a “sympathetic public” that would reinforce the sense that citizens have the moral duty to take care of one another. Thus, this form of heritageisation was then particularly focused on socialising citizens and promoting moral values.

The sense of a moral duty to remember also comes forward in the work of Eyal (2004), although this is not based on a sense of nostalgia but rather its opposite: trauma, which entails a negative assessment of the past. Focusing on a group of Czech intellectual dissidents during the socialist period, Eyal (2004) shows how they developed a memory campaign that focused on the moral corruption that had been imposed on society through their complicity in the communist crimes. After the events of 1989, then, the problem according to this group was that the unconscious effects of socialism were still present in society – and that the only way to overcome these painful collective memories was to recognise them and confess them. Making people remember, then, became a moral purpose, focused on “sacrificing a ‘scapegoat’ for society’s sins, thereby guaranteeing the establishment of the rule of law in the present, and allowing the majority of the citizens to put the past behind them” (Eyal, 2004, p.24).

Besides this work on the traumatic remembrance of the socialist past, there has also been developed an extensive work on nostalgia towards the socialist past in post-socialist societies. Starting in the former GDR in East-Germany some years after the event of 1989, scholars have observed practices of Ostalgie - a nostalgia for the East - throughout post-socialist states in the mid-1990s. Again, the major transformations entailed in the shift from the socialist to the capitalist system in countries of the former Eastern Bloc provide a background for understanding the emergence and expansion of nostalgia towards the socialist period (e.g. Boym, 2002). Hence, in the context of the large unemployment and low

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15 wages in the 1990s and beyond, this nostalgia entails the longing for the stability and security and prosperity that was provided by the socialist regimes (Todorova, 2010). Moreover, this could entail a longing to a feeling of pride in labour and production and being “part of a project that was modern and directed towards the general good” (Pine, 2002, p. 111). Following from the above, it is easy to see that nostalgia can also function as a critique on contemporary forms of global capitalism (Berdahl, 2010; Macdonald, 2013).

Other scholars have pointed out that nostalgia reminds people of an imagined time of greater communitarian solidarity (Macdonald, 2013). Aligning to the work of Smith (2006) and Muehlebach (2017), nostalgia in post-socialist context fulfils important roles with regard to collective identities. As Berdahl (1999, p.205) argues, that both the practices of nostalgia and the way others comment on it “reflect and constitute struggles over the control and appropriation of historical knowledge, shared memories, and personal recollections - all of which interact in highly complicated ways.” For example, Berdahl (1999) shows how in the GDR the Ossi-identity is proudly presented as being different from the Wessi’s: practices of nostalgia then become a focus for shared memories and create the sense of an “us-ness.” Yet, it can also function as a platform of distinction the other way around: Boyer (2010, p.21) notes that certain groups of elites in post-socialist states use nostalgia to “claim legitimacy […] based precisely on their ability and desire to extricate their fellow citizens from their endemic past-orientation and backwardness.”

In addition to nostalgia as longing towards the past, other scholars have pointed out how nostalgia can function as a means to critique the current government. This often involves ironic readings of the past. For example, Georgescu (2010) has argued how the use of images as well as musical references to Romania’s socialist leader Ceausescu are used to criticise the current government by underlining the continuities that still exist between the socialist and post-socialist state. In a similar vein, focusing on socialist objects from the former GDR, Bach (2014) has argued that in the process of commodification the meanings of these objects have opened-up and have been revaluated in many ways, often referring to the past in ironic ways. Doing so, Bach (2014, p.135) shows that this kind of use of socialist objects “subtly undermines the redemptive quality of collective memory as a national project under the guidance of professional historians and the state.”

As a final remark, the passing by of time is also seen as an important factor in the increase of nostalgic sentiments. According to Creed (2010), the emergence has been dependent both on the impossibility of return to a socialist system and on the improvement of the economic situation in people's everyday life. From a different perspective, Georgescu (2010) argues that the intensity of negative associations has diminished, and as such, certain aspects or symbols of the socialist past and socialist culture have been opened up for new symbolic interpretations. The ideas of nostalgia are further enhanced through the curiosity of younger generations living in post-socialist states, which have less emotional involvement (Todorova, 2010).

Thus as the above has indicated, the production of heritage takes place through the discourses and practices of a wide variety of actors in different situations. Looking beyond the state’s engagement in dealing with socialist sites and shifting our focus towards the way in which civil society approaches these sites in both formal to informal ways, we can thus start to get a more nuanced but also more complex understanding of the meaning that is ascribed to socialist sites the ways in which they are (or might be) heritageised.

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2.5 The tour guide as heritage producer

The previous sections have set out the diverging ways in which actors have engaged in processes of heritageisation, particularly contrasting the economic and political ways in which heritage has been used by statist institutions with the social uses in which residents and communities are involved in heritageisation. Yet, what do these insights tell us about the role of the tour guide in the production of heritage? Although some early work depicted tour guides simply as transmitters of knowledge (e.g. Holloway 1981), it is now generally accepted that their role is politicized “as theirs is the task of selection, glossing and interpreting sights” (Dahles, 2002, p.784). But how does this process work in practice?

The work of Macdonald (2006) is particularly helpful here, in which she has conceptualised the tour guide as a cultural mediator between the built environment and the tours’

participants. To understand how this process of mediation takes place, she has argued that, on the one hand, it is important to consider who is behind the tours and how they are positioned in society. To do so, one needs to look at the tour guide him- or herself as well as the organisation. On the other hand, the way in which mediation takes place is dependent on the practices of the tour, in which Macdonald (2006) distinguishes three dimensions. First, it is highly dependent on the conventions and restrictions that are in place for (particular types of) guided tours. The difference between mass-tourist coach tours versus walking tours of tailor-made tours is obvious, as well as between different genres of tours. Second, the way that the tour is produced is dependent on its audiences: both the ‘real’ ones that are encountered during the tour and the ‘imagined’ ones. This is an important point, as it recognises that tour guiding takes shape through a ‘feedback loop,’ not only reflecting the perspectives of the tour guides but also the desires and interests of (previous) audiences. Third, and of particular importance in this research, the mediation in the tour is dependent upon the properties and materialities of the surroundings themselves. For one part, Macdonald (2006) directs our attention to the mundane and practical ways in which materialities influences the tour: for example, guides can only show sites that can be reached within a particular time frame. More important, however, is her discussion on the way in which tour guides adapt their narratives to materialities. This theme will be explored more in-depth below, after the tour guides themselves have been discussed.

So, who are the tour guides? An early study by Holloway (1981) on coach tours suggests that tour guides are generally well-educated and part of the middle-class, and this indeed seems to fit the wide range of skills any tour guide requires: he or she needs not only to be knowledgeable on the subjects of interest, but also apply a range of organisational and social skills. More recent studies understand the tour guide as a cultural entrepreneur, that needs to creatively combine stories and myths from a range of sources with their intimate knowledge of the city’s landscape. Wynn (2010) argues that tour guides should be seen as “urban alchemists,” that innovatively use the city’s public spaces and public culture to make money and sustain themselves. The work of Guano (2015) has shown how the emergence of such entrepreneurs might also be understood in the context of changing economic circumstances. Focusing on the de-industrialising Italian city Genoa, he has argued that tour guides represent a ‘residual’ part of the creative class that have emerged as guides in the context of the city’s intellectuals under- and unemployment. Moreover, through these tour guides practices, they also fulfil an important – yet underestimated – role in influencing the city’s image and culture. Guano (2015) talks about “bottom-up” branding and also Wynn (2010) argues that “while the large-scale, big budget interlocking bureaucracies work to “revitalize”

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17 central cities from above, [tour guides] produce an alternate culture at the street-level” (p.159). Yet, while the profiles sketched by Wynn (2010) and Guano (2015) mainly represent self-employed tour guides, the properties of the tour guide will be different in other context. Macdonald’s (2006) study, for example, discusses a group of tour guides that is working for a cultural organisation that employs many university students part-time.

Further, it is important to emphasise that the guides are not ‘only’ mediators but might also become a part of the tour itself. Indeed, the tour guide needs to employ emotional labour (Guano 2015) and is a central element or part of the tour, and as such also of the tours’ performance and market value. Focusing on tours by and about Native Alaskans, Bunten (2008) argues that guides are continuously working in becoming what she calls a commodified persona: the guide “adjust[s] his or her values, emotions, or both, to achieve an economic goal” (p.381). Yet, Bunten (2008) shows that this is a complex and contradictory process. On the one hand, the marketable image these guides create for themselves is based on the desires of tourist’ about encountering the Other; but on the other hand, guides intertwine their presented identity with aspects that are countering hegemonic or western ideas about the Other. Although the study of Bunten (2008) focuses on the rather specific setting of a subaltern culture, similar processes of negotiating the own identity in relation to economic objectives can be presumed to take place in any other tour with a ‘local’ guide. Of course, the way that the guide is positioned within society is also interrelated with the organisation or tour operator that he or she is part of. This becomes particularly clear in Dahles’ (2002) study on Indonesian tour guides in the eighties, whom were strongly controlled by the New Order government through their training, certification, payment and so forth. These guides were required to re-produce strict pre-fabricated narratives, and ignore any aspect that the regime would find ‘undesirable.’ Even though this is a rather extreme example taking place within an authoritarian regime, it does highlight some of the ways in which institutional affiliation influences the mediation process that can also be present in Western democratic societies. Often, such influence will have to do with funding in the case of non-profit organisations. This is illustrated in Macdonald’s (2006) study on tour guides of the Nazi-past, in which a tour guide emphasised that “the politically non-aligned character of the organisations’ work […] has been important for the continued funding by the city government under different ruling political parties over the years” (p.126). Needless to say, this decision and positioning is very much political. A similar issue comes forwards in Fennell’s (2012) study, where the National Public Housing Museum was strategically framed to align to “the immigration biography of struggle and mobility that has long been constructed as the cultural heritage of all Americans” (p.652). Overall, the way in which the guide functions as a cultural mediator is thus strongly intertwined with how he or she, as well as the organisation, is positioned within society.

As mentioned, the properties of the built environment itself are also of crucial influence within the process of mediation. Macdonald (2006) has particularly focused on the possible contrast that can emerge between the sites’ semiotics and the guides’ ‘preferred reading’ and how the guide negotiates this towards his audience. These semiotics can include architectural language, but also the presence of graffiti or garbage. Macdonald (2006) has developed her ideas studying tours around the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg. She argues that the guides attempt to encourage a ‘preferred reading’ of the sites, that seeks to avoid glorification of the Nazi-regime. In order to do so, the guides use the strategy of what she calls ‘façade peeling,’ in which the aesthetics or monumentality of a particular site are

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18 disregarded by the tour guide in order to show the uglier ‘reality’ behind it. Macdonald (2006) contrasts this with Fine and Speer’s (1985) concept of ‘sight sacralisation,’ which instead refers to the way in which the ‘ordinary’ might be elevated to an important tourist sight. The work of Fennell (2012) and Muehlebach (2017) also discusses the way in which the built environment is mediated in tours, but adds to Macdonald’s (2006) insights in two important ways. First, their work exceeds semiotics to also include the way in which emplacement and sensory experiences influence the way meaning and affect is transmitted to audiences. Second, while Macdonald (2006) seems to understand the built environment itself as a given that mostly constrains the guides’ agency, Fennell (2012) and Muehlebach (2017) direct our attention to the way in which the built environment can be adjusted in order to direct audiences towards the ‘proper’ or desired interpretation. Examples of such strategies include the incorporation of familiar domestic items within a tour as to stimulate feelings of normality and commonness between the imagined subjects and their publics (Fennell, 2012, p.654) or by making audiences physically using an industrial machine as “an exercise in historical sympathy” (Muehlebach, 2017, p.114). This thus attributes more agency to the tour guide, as is reflected in Fennell’s (2012) use of the term curator. Of course, the planning of a museum in Fennell’s (2012) study enables more ‘curating’ than the existing heritage site in which Macdonald’s (2006) tour guides are active, yet, it can be assumed that also within the city guides can adjust tours to fit their own purposes.

2.6 Conclusion

The previous sections have developed an understanding of heritage as the “contemporary use of the past.” Heritage is produced in the present, through the discourses and practices of a broad range of actors. On the one hand, we have seen how the state and other authorities have institutionalised particular interpretations of heritage, thereby re-enforcing existing power relations and ideologies. For a large part this has focused on the legitimisation and naturalisation of the nation-state, and more recently, also on global or regional authorities, exemplified by UNESCO and the EU. Besides these political functions of heritageisation, authorities have also used heritageisation for economic purposes, particularly in the context of cities that attempt to attract tourism to generate economic revenue. These institutionalised interpretations focus on aesthetic, monumental and scientific qualities of heritage objects. On the other hand, however, it has been shown that heritageisation processes also take place outside of the statist sphere. Citizens are involved in heritageisation processes in which they attach social meanings to the built environment. Heritageisation can then function as a means to preserve and strengthen a sense of local identity and community, as a means to socialise citizens for moral purposes, or as a means to critique contemporary societal circumstances. Heritage, then, is not so much based on the monumental or aesthetic qualities of sites, but on the social meanings associated with them. Overall, then, processes of heritageisation can only be understood by looking at who is driving them. How the tour is positioned in relation to these political, economic and social functions of heritageisation is not straightforward. As cultural mediators and curators, they negotiate between their own interpretations, that of their organisation and that of their audiences. Existing literature has positioned them as a group of well-educated, entrepreneurial individuals. Tour guides are driven by economic objectives, but at the same time also by socio-political ones.

Considering the case of socialist sites in the post-socialist states of Eastern Europe, it has been shown that authorities have generally marginalised the socialist past and its associated

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19 sites in the context of their desire to confirm their post-socialist national identities. Moreover, it has been shown that in the cases that socialist sites have been heritageised by state-driven institutions, the focus has been very much on the architectural qualities and material properties, while neglecting their social or historical significance. Although there exists little research on the way in which other actors attach meaning to socialist sites in a post-socialist context, there has been developed an extensive literature on the way in which the socialist past is remembered in society – focusing both on the trauma and nostalgia – which is helpful in considering how heritageisation, as a particular form of memory, works.

To explore how socialist sites might be heritageised outside of the state, the communist-themed city tours provide an interesting case. These tours, focused on an international audience, explicitly focus on the socialist identity and traces in the city and enlarge rather than underemphasise the socialist past. Hence, they seem to be at odds with general statist and societal perspectives, while arguably a very powerful way of producing a socialist heritage due to its (international) outreach and high visibility in the city. Yet, as little is known about how these sites are valued and heritageised, this research attempts to answer the following research question: How do communist-themed guided tours in Sofia and Bucharest participate in, and contribute to, the production of an emerging type of built socialist heritage?

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3. Methodology

This chapter sets out how the research has been conducted in both methodological and practical terms. The first part will set out and explain the research question and sub-questions, after which the use of the comparative case study design and the selection of the cities of Bucharest and Sofia will be discussed. Thereafter, the methods that have been used for the data collection and data analysis will be set out. The section concludes by discussing some the most important methodological constraints and limitations of this study.

3.1 Research questions

As has briefly been pointed out in the previous chapters, this research focuses on the way in which socialist heritage is produced through communist-themed guided city tours in Sofia and Bucharest. Hence, the overarching question guiding this study is as follows:

How do communist-themed guided tours in Sofia and Bucharest participate in, and contribute to, the production of a built socialist heritage?

This question requires some clarification. As has been discussed in the previous chapter, this study understands heritage to be processual and always in the making (and unmaking). By focusing on communist-themed tours, this study looks at a distinct field of heritageisation. This production is located outside of the official sphere of the state, but does also not represent heritage production and consumption in the everyday sphere. The study focuses on the way in which tour organisations, in interplay with tourists, are involved in producing a socialist heritage.

Four sub-questions have been formulated to address this question. The first and second focus on the producers (that is, the tour guides) and how they have gone about developing such tours, while the third and fourth question focus on the way socialist heritage is produced in practice, that is, during the tours. The questions are as follows:

a) Who are the tour guides and what are their objectives and interests in the production of socialist heritage?

Following from the political nature of heritage, we can only understand (particular versions of) heritage if we consider who is involved in producing it. As such, this study puts central the actors driving heritageisation processes, which are in this case the guides from the communist-themed tours. An assessment of the actors that are or have been involved reveals which objectives underlay the (re)construction of the communist heritage, and thereby also help explain why it has been produced in this particular way. It should be noted that there are other producing actors at work as well during or in the development of these tours, most particularly, the tour’s participants itself. Although recognising the influence that audiences have on the way in which a tour takes shape, the study focuses solely on the tour guides.

b) How have tour agencies developed the communist-themed tours in terms of the selection of sites to be visited and the sources that have been used in the narration? This question addresses how the tours have been developed and set up by tour agencies. As such, it has been attempted to get an understanding of the ideological, strategic and pragmatic choices that have been made in developing the tours.

The tour guide as heritage producer : socialist sites in Bucharest and Sofia