THE REENACTMENT AS TOURISM EXPLOITATION THROUGH HERITAGE INTERPRETATION OF HERITAGE SITES IN TRANSYLVANIA

Abstract

The Reenactment as Tourism Exploitation through Heritage Interpretation of Heritage Sites in Transylvania. Beside the need of reviewing up to date the theoretical progress in the field, we aimed at reviewing the challenges the reenactment performances in Romania have to face as presented in the literature. Another aim of this paper was to furnish an inventory of all tourism objectives in Transylvania where heritage interpretation in the form of reenactment is performed as a form of tourism exploitation of numerous sites. Another objective of this paper was to investigate the main issues of audience’s expectations regarding the performance of reenactment at Romanian historical tourism sites and issues practitioners have to challenge in their relatively recent activity. No theoretical meta-analysis or literature review paper on theoretical progress was found. The theoretical preoccupations for unifying the terminology and conceptualization seems to date since the Gotteborg (2012) Conference Re/theorisation of Heritage Studies, but from 2012 the interest in theorization was increasing, being visible in the number of papers published per year in peer-reviewed indexed journals. The results on the Romanian context were consistent with previous works stating that audience’s expectations, in their nature and information content, were very diverse. Half of the subjects investigated through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires assessing the expected level of satisfaction with the reenactment performance and the actual level of satisfaction after the performance showed positive differences. The (historical) reenactment represents a viable modality of heritage interpretation in Romania and an efficient mean of tourism exploitation with positive results especially for the citadels in Transylvania.