This paper conceptualises Greek national pavilions at World Trade Fairs and International Expos as rhetorical acts - that is, as spatialised regimes of representation that operate as visual arguments promoting Greece's modernisation and tourism development on an international stage. Greece's participations consistently framed the modern Greek state as the heir of classical antiquity, consolidating a teleological narrative of historical continuity and progress. By the interwar period, Greek pavilion design articulated a more complex semiotic assemblage, in which classical heritage was reconfigured, alongside Byzantine and folkloric elements, as exportable signifiers of national identity. This curatorial strategy was aligned with, and actively supported, emergent tourism policies. Focusing on the work of Greek architects Alexandra Paschalidou-Moreti and Dimitris Moretis this study draws on rare archival materials to analyse and reinterpret Greek pavilion design as a form of spatial-rhetorical practice and cultural translation. It argues that national pavilions should be understood not merely as stylistic or ideological artefacts shaped by shifting political contexts, but rather as structured mediatory forms that translate historical cultural temporalities into coherent and consumable narratives of national identity. In this sense, pavilion architecture emerges as a key instrument in the articulation of Greece's modern nation-branding strategies, simultaneously shaping tourist imaginaries.
This article investigates the role of the Greek tourist police from its establishment in 1935-1974, highlighting its crucial but overlooked contribution to the development of tourism and statecraft in the Mediterranean. Moving beyond ministries and promotional campaigns, the article argues that the tourist police operated at the grassroots level as enforcers of order, aesthetics, and ideology - key elements in the branding of Greece as a safe and civilised destination. Through archival and institutional sources, it shows how the tourist police mediated between hospitality and surveillance, as well as tourism and coercion, contributing to both domestic social disciplining and the state's international image. From authoritarian modernisation under Metaxas to the postwar 'reserved democracy' and the 1967-1974 dictatorship, the tourist police exemplified how small Mediterranean states mobilised everyday state actors to project global relevance, manage internal difference, and construct national identity through tourism.
Western mainstream newspaper coverage of the Hippie Trail in the 1960s and 1970s focused overwhelmingly upon local and state opposition to the hippies' presence. While early academic studies of the Trail similarly highlighted host community antipathy towards the hippies, the vast majority of scholarship has focused on the hippies' perspectives, motivations, and experiences. Drawing upon recent case studies that emphasise local, and sometimes quite positive, perspectives on these visitors, this article revisits western press coverage of the Trail to demonstrate how it amplified local host-community criticism and reflected concerns emanating from the tourists' home nations. Overall, we demonstrate that the Hippie Trail produced a complex web of interactions between hippies and hosts - one that resulted in a forceful backlash against these unconventional travellers, but that also helped to set the stage for future tourism initiatives.
Was mass tourism socially sustainable? To answer this question, we conducted oral history fieldwork focusing on the relationships between tourists and the local community. We interviewed tourists of different ages, professions, and geographical origins who spent their holidays on the Adriatic coast between the 1930s and the 1980s. The result is rather unexpected. The literature on mass tourism has generally developed conceptualisations that emphasise its unsustainability. In contrast, our oral history investigation highlights a socially and culturally sustainable practice, at least as regards the significant proportion of tourists who returned for repeated holidays and stayed for many days on each occasion. This finding can be linked to the literature on destination stewardship, which identifies repeat visits as a means of strengthening place attachment and encouraging more responsible behaviour on the part of tourists. Furthermore, extended stays and repeat holidays represent a crucial distinction between mass tourism and overtourism.
This article introduces the special issue 'Touristed: European Travellers, Host Communities and the Production of Local Culture', which emphasises the importance of host communities in creating and sustaining the tourist industry across 'modern' Europe. It focuses on the active and complex roles hosts played in the production of local culture between 1880 and 1940 - a time when the consumption of standardised local culture became an inherent and essential aspect of the tourist experience.
The early history of tourism in Bali is often narrated through the activities of colonial administrators, foreign artists, and cultural institutions that promoted the island as an exotic destination. Such narratives rarely consider the role of indigenous intermediaries who facilitated the circulation of Balinese cultural objects within emerging tourism markets. This article examines the activities of a Balinese woman known as Mak Patimah of Singaraja, whose presence in colonial newspapers, travel accounts, and exhibition reports between 1921 and 1937 reveals how local actors participated in the formation of Bali's early tourism economy. Mak Patimah occupied a strategic position linking local craft production, colonial exhibition networks, and international travellers. Drawing on the concepts of cultural brokerage and the commodification of cultural objects, this article argues that Mak Patimah functioned as an indigenous intermediary who mediated the early circulation of Balinese art and craft within emerging international tourism networks, highlighting the role of gendered entrepreneurship in Bali's early tourism economy.
Between 1950 and 1962 Hollywood film companies moved many of their productions to European studios, including Cinecitt & agrave; in Rome. Doing so was more economically profitable and allowed them to capitalise on location shooting. Among the films that Hollywood realised in Italy, several were romantic comedies featuring US tourists visiting the country as protagonists. Focusing on the holiday experience, these comedies reflected the growing and relevant presence of American tourists in 1950s Italy. Working from a film history perspective and integrating movie analysis with information from archival documents and printed sources, this article makes three primary arguments. First, the afore mentioned Hollywood romances were a means of promoting Italy to the American public, as part of a broad media network supported by the tourism industry. Second, depicting postcard-like Italian scenarios and stereotypical portraits of local people, they cast an external gaze on the country, superimposing the mediatic image of Italy as a destination onto the complexity of Italy as a nation, i.e. a historic, political, and social construction. Finally, they metaphorised the political and diplomatic relationship between the two countries in the post-war period, when Italy steadily entered the US sphere of influence.
Jean Negulesco's 1957 film Boy on a Dolphin employs three key locations - the Acropolis of Athens, the Astir beach resort in Glyfada, and the island of Hydra - to reflect post-WWII efforts to rebrand Greece as a modern summer destination. The film functions as a rhetorical visual argument, articulating ideological tensions between antiquity (the reconstructed Stoa of Attalos and the Parthenon), tradition (the island of Hydra), and modernity (the Astir resort and the renovated Acropolis Museum). Together, these elements contribute to the forging of a new national image. This paper examines the range of actors involved in shaping Greece's emerging tourism identity, including the Greek state, American interests and local communities. It treats Boy on a Dolphin as a medium of cultural communication, analysing how national identity was reframed through infrastructure modernisation - particularly the transformation of archaeological sites and the construction of modern leisure facilities. Drawing on historical research and archival sources, the analysis sheds light on the 1950s discourse surrounding Greece's tourism policy and its partial implementation due to practical challenges on the ground. The paper ultimately reveals the complex interplay between antiquity, vernacular tradition and modernity in constructing the idealised image of the 'Greek summer' in cinema.
The article examines the sojourns of refugees from Eastern and Central Europe in Portuguese health spas during the years of WWII. Due to scarcity of accommodation in Lisbon following the influx of tens of thousands of refugees after the fall of France, many refugees were put into assigned residence in spa towns, where they were sustained by aid organisations. The wealthy stayed in Estoril at their own expense. Based on scientific literature about refugees in Portugal, documents written by refugees, oral history interviews, writings by contemporary witnesses, newspaper and magazine articles and archival material (reports, correspondence), and the historical-critical interpretation of this material, the article shows how these refugees experienced their stays, how they converted the spas into transnational spaces by their presence, how they lived together with the locals, and how they shaped their host towns by inducing changes in fashion and society.
This article describes the historical evolution of a regional tourist spectacle in Europe at the start of the twentieth century, understood as a folklorising authentication process in which various actors negotiated regional identity from unequal positions of power. It takes a micro-historical approach, providing a local history of the touristic genesis of El Parado de Valldemossa, the first regional dance group in Majorca. The text sheds light on the power of tourists when it comes to imagining the cultural features of the region consumed and the privileged position of the local intermediary elite in the tourist practice of performing regional identity. It also highlights the various tactics of everyday resistance by the subaltern peasantry and their local descendants, called upon to embody the subordinating regional touristic stereotype. In this sense, it concludes that the touristic construction of regional authenticity at the start of the twentieth century responded primarily to the provincial bourgeoisie's fear of losing its social dominance in the face of political democratisation and the workers' revolution.
This article explores the tentative notion of spa literature morphing into the heterogeneous body of the transnational and pan-European 'sanatorial text' and proposes the notion that this text body consists of different 'primal scenes' (Ned Lukacher), which can be viewed as 'a trope for reading'. The aim of this article is to use Lukacher's concept of primal scenes as a reading lens for decoding two swimming pool scenes in Milan Kundera's novel Valcik na rozloucenou (1970-1971; Farewell Waltz, first published in English as The Farewell Party, transl. P. Kussi 1972) and Bohumil Hrabal's Obsluhoval jsem anglickeho krale (1971; I Served the King of England, transl. Paul R. Wilson 1989). Both novels address the interactions between hotel and spa personnel and their guests, revealing the gender and bio-politics in this sphere and turning it into a contested field of both transnational interests and politics of national identity. The close temporal proximity in which the two novels were written and the almost mirror-inverted architecture of the two scenes provide substantial basis for their comparative analysis. The analysis sheds new light on the intertextual connections between the two works and uncovers writers' strategies for the sanatorial text as a broader concept.
