75 MARTINDALE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF PRIVATE ENTERPRISE al and historical heritage alongside memorial tourism” (Vukovarski Vodotoranj, 2022). Vukovar, a town not known for its attractiveness to tourists, kept markers of the war to remember what happened. Dubrovnik, contrastingly, turned directly to rebuilding. Today, the buildings have no scars, just picturesque architecture restored to what it was before the siege. This contrast can be attributed to the importance Dubrovnik has for attracting tourists and feeding the country’s economy. The need to create a new image for Dubrovnik was specific to the city, not necessarily the rest of the country. Prioritizing high-tourism cities over Vukovar and others was a deliberate act of national policy by the CNTB (Rivera, 2008). The monetary value each city held for Croatia’s republic affected its importance to be rebuilt. Even though Vukovar lacked traditional appeal to tourists, its use as a site of memorial tourism was nonetheless capitalized on. In addition to the Water Tower, Vukovar is now a popular site of memorial tourism. Other memorial sites around the town are the Ovčara Memorial Center, Vukovar Memorial Cemetery, Vukovar National Memorial Hospital, Memorial Center of Croatian War Veterans, and Homeland War Memorial Center (Mrvica Mađarac 2020). As opposed to Dubrovnik, Vukovar’s memorials acknowledge the significance of preservation and recognition of cultural heritage and foster memorial tourism while doing so. This comparison between sites of conflict in Croatia illustrates how the country responded to areas depending on monetary value; areas with fewer traditional tourists can afford to properly acknowledge the repercussions of war, but areas of high traditional tourism fall short in order to preserve an enticing international image. Lasting effects of tourism on cultural heritage It is not the mere presence of tourism in areas once affected by war that is the issue in Dubrovnik. In fact, tourism in places with cultural significance can be a positive factor; it can boost economies and, when paired with meaningful commemoration, also can work to solidify and legitimize war narratives and deepen public understanding of a place’s past (Bishop, 2014). This tourism is only a positive factor, however, if there are actual, truthful depictions of conflict in these heritage sites. Vukovar’s memorial tourism demonstrates this positive strategy. But a site devoid of meaningful commemorations, as in Dubrovnik, offers visitors no entry point into how the war significantly and traumatically shifted the place's heritage. Tourists leave with a perspective of Dubrovnik that misses its wartime history entirely and with it any deeper understanding of the city’s identity. When an abundance of tourists visits a place without gaining a proper understanding of its past, they leave ignorant to the events—in this case, the siege of Dubrovnik—that have shaped a place’s collective memory, resulting in a lack of foreign cultural understanding. Alternatively, memorial tourism can help boost a place’s cultural heritage by fortifying a collective understanding of its past. The problem deepens when tourism tips into overtourism, when too many tourists arrive in a destination at the same time or when tourists outnumber residents (Abbasian et al., 2020). Based on nine metrics established by Bobic and Akhavan (2022), Dubrovnik qualifies as an endangered city due to overtourism. Dubrovnik scored above the benchmark on seven of the nine: importance of tourism, arrivals growth, density of tourism, tourism intensity, arrival seasonality, attraction concentration, and historic site prevalence (Bobic & Akhavan, 2022). An interview conducted with a local Dubrovnik tourism worker indicates how the city is overwhelmed: “Seven cruise ships and 13,000 tourists on the streets of Dubrovnik in one day… too many cruise ships at the same time and the Old Town of Dubrovnik is too small for that number of tourists” (Abbasian et al., 2020, p. 4). This issue is heightened by Dubrovnik’s small size, 96.7 hectares, with a buffer zone surrounding the protected heritage site. With the influx of tourists, citizens are being pushed out of their homes, particularly in the Old City. Housing costs have risen so sharply that residents of Dubrovnik cannot afford to live within the historic walls, even when it is not peak tourist season. The houses and apartments in Dubrovnik are more expensive relative to median incomes than in Hong Kong, one of the least affordable places to live in the world (Mikulić et al., 2021). This price hike is primarily due to the attractiveness of making money from vacation rentals; apartments are converted to short-term rentals, and middle-class inhabitants can no longer afford average properties. The consequences are clear—a hollowing out of the historic center. Mass tourism has led to a decrease in residents there, economic dependency on tourism, gentrification of the UNESCO World Heritage site, and what Hristić and colleagues (2024) call a commodification of heritage, a decline in authenticity. With residents gone, Dubrovnik retains its tangible heritage, as the buildings still stand, but lacks the intangible heritage that only a living community can sustain.
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