Culture

Why People Visit Places of Tragedy

Chernobyl. Auschwitz. Ground Zero. Millions of tourists visit the sites of disasters and atrocities every year. What are they looking for?

Trace the connections

Why this rabbit hole matters

Millions of tourists visit sites of atrocity, disaster, and death each year: Auschwitz receives 2.3 million visitors annually, Chernobyl became a tourist destination after the HBO series, Ground Zero draws 5 million visitors. This phenomenon — 'dark tourism' or 'thanatourism' — raises uncomfortable questions about the ethics of witnessing, the role of entertainment in grief, and whether tourism trivializes tragedy or helps people confront mortality. The academic field of dark tourism studies has grown dramatically since 9/11.

Dark tourism (the term coined by Malcolm Foley and John Lennon in 1996) refers to travel to places associated with death, tragedy, or the macabre. Sites include Holocaust memorials, former prisons, disaster zones, battlefields, and sites of mass violence. The field spans a spectrum from respectful remembrance (Auschwitz) to crass exploitation (disaster selfie tourism). Dark tourism researchers study visitor motivations — which range from education and commemoration to morbid curiosity and entertainment — and the ethics of how sites manage and present tragedy.

Connections to follow

Thanatourism

Thanatourism (from Thanatos, the Greek personification of death) is a broader term than dark tourism, focusing specifically on travel motivated by death and mortality — including visits to cemeteries (a major form of 19th-century leisure tourism), battlefield tourism, and disaster sites. Victorian Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris was designed as a tourist destination; Scottish battlefield tours have operated since the 19th century. The motivations researchers identify include contemplation of mortality, historical education, paying respects, and morbid curiosity — often in combination.

Grief Voyeurism and Ethics

The ethics of dark tourism are genuinely contested. Critics argue that visiting sites of atrocity — especially taking selfies, buying souvenirs, or treating tragedy as entertainment — is a form of exploitation that disrespects victims and their families. Defenders argue that witnessing is a form of respect, that education requires confrontation with reality, and that the alternative (sanitized ignorance) is worse. The debate becomes most intense at sites of living memory: Ground Zero, where victims' families are still alive; Auschwitz, where survivors still visit; and conflict zones where death is ongoing.

Chernobyl Tourism

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine has been accessible to regulated tourism since 2011. After the 2019 HBO miniseries 'Chernobyl,' visitor numbers surged 30–40%, reaching over 100,000 in 2019. Tourists visit the reactor building, the abandoned city of Pripyat, and the Chernobyl power plant itself with Geiger counters and lead-lined guides. The zone has become a strange post-apocalyptic landscape where abandoned infrastructure is being reclaimed by nature — an accidental rewilding area with thriving wolf, lynx, and Przewalski's horse populations.

Memorial Culture

Memorial culture — the practices and institutions societies use to remember and honor the dead — has exploded since the late 20th century. Roadside memorials, moving-image walls, experiential museums, and digital memorials represent new forms of public grief. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) was revolutionary: a non-triumphalist, individual-honoring design that invited touch and emotional engagement. The Holocaust memorial in Berlin submerges visitors in a disorienting grid of slabs. Memorial design has become a major artistic and political field, raising questions about whose deaths are commemorated and by whom.

The Economics of Catastrophe: Who Profits from Dark Sites

Dark tourism generates significant economic activity, much of it flowing to people who had no connection to the original tragedy. Auschwitz-Birkenau receives 2.3 million visitors annually, generating revenue that funds preservation, staff, and educational programs — as well as the surrounding economy. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone generated $15 million in tourism revenue in 2019 before the Russian invasion. Private companies run 'slum tours' in Mumbai, Rio, and Cape Town, charging wealthy tourists to observe extreme poverty — with debates about whether local communities benefit from the entry fees. The economic structure of dark tourism raises a question that ethics cannot easily answer: if economic activity from tragedy funds preservation and education, is the commercial element corrupting or enabling?

Auschwitz as Case Study: When Memorial Becomes Spectacle

Auschwitz-Birkenau receives 2.3 million annual visitors — more than any other Holocaust site in the world — making it simultaneously the best-preserved and most-visited site of industrialized mass murder in history. Managing that volume has forced the memorial directorate to make difficult decisions: regulating photography (selfies at the train tracks sparked international controversy), requiring guided tours (to prevent uncontextualized wandering), and refusing commercial film crews for entertainment productions. Yet spectacularization has occurred anyway: the site appears in Instagram posts with aesthetic filters; visitors have been photographed balancing on rusted rail tracks. The memorial director has argued publicly that the site is in danger of becoming a tourist attraction rather than a place of reckoning — and that scale itself is part of the problem.