Adventure Warsaw – Adventure PRL!

An Ethnographic Contribution to the Commodification of Communist Heritage as Tourist Destination and Cultural Resource

Abstract

The article analyses practices and images of commercialization of the communist heritage as tourist destination and cultural resource in today’s Warsaw. The analysis at the intersection of heritage studies, historical tourism and material culture focuses on two empirical case studies as examples of commercial popularization of the history of People’s Republic of Poland (1945-1989). These are the communist heritage tours of WPT 1313 and the documentation of the communist heritage exhibition at the Museum of Life in the PRL. The article argues that the commodification of the PRL era as destination, resource and practice is based on the prototypical, nostalgic longing of tourists for a sensual and emotional experience of the authentic past. The heritage tours and the museum as commercialized products of Polish tourism culture, based on the amalgamation of tourism and past, fill a gap in Warsaw’s tourist market. An ethnographic perspective on the practices, spaces, images and agents, which fill this niche, illustrates how they create sensual-emotive, aesthetic and performative fields of discovering and experiencing of the communist heritage. Finally, the article explores how these mechanisms and agents shape the tourist infrastructure of ​​Warsaw while oscillating between playful appropriation and critical distancing towards the communist past.