Battlefield Guidance From a New Angle

Abstract

In dark tourism, professional tourist guides are the primary intermediaries interacting with travelers. Guides provide them with an immersive and educational experience by drawing on many different fields such as history, geography, and literature in their narratives. They use a variety of sources in these fields to enrich their narratives, and literary works are one such source that can be particularly valuable. By drawing on the insights and inspiration from literary works, tourist guides can create engaging and memorable narratives that deepen visitors’ understanding of the local culture and heritage. The battlefield is one area where such enriched narratives are essential. Wars that have occurred in locations with both cultural and historical significance are well documented in national and international tourism literature. The way these battlefields are shown is novel. From this perspective, this study aims to: firstly, investigate battlefields that have not received sufficient attention, utilizing novels as underexplored literary sources; secondly, to analyze these sources through geo-literary reading, a relatively novel approach. The development of tour routes in five provinces in Turkey (Ankara, Eskişehir, Bilecik, Kütahya, and Afyon), where significant battles occurred during the national struggle over a period of four years, aims to provide travel companies with innovative tour programs for the global market and to facilitate the planning of specialized battlefield training for guides in these regions.

Citation

Sökmen, S., Çapa, A.B. and Günay, S. (2024), "Battlefield Guidance From a New Angle", Sharma, A., Arora, S. and Shukla, P. (Ed.) Dark Tourism (Building the Future of Tourism), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 75-88. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83797-336-120241006