Lost Traveler

COS/TOUR/699493/DIVERTIMENTO Game Series. The Great Traveller, 2016

The heritage narrative starts with the Argonauts and is evolving toward the Greek colonization of the Black Sea, the Romans, the Byzantines and the Ottomans until it reaches the Turkish War of Independence in the aftermath of WWI. A local high school community developed a story based on the heritage narrative, which connects ten selected monuments in the wider area of Trabzon with a read thread. The main game idea is not only to promote the local tourism but to engage other schools and stakeholders to replicate the video concept developing new stories based on heritage described in the Pilot Project. A theatrical representation is recorded and included in the εBook. Visitors demonstrate the evidence of the knowledge acquired at the game locations, which is shared through the social media channels. The clues for the Game Play are embedded in the eBook of “Connecting Cultures. A truly Eurasian Story" available at the APPSTORE (https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/connectingcultures/id1265400693).

Proceedings of Conferences on the Dialogue between Science and Theology, 2016

This paper will look at the manner in which Romania is perceived by an Irishman, Peter Hurley, living here for twenty years, travelling on foot from Săpânța to Bucharest (26 days, 650 kilometers) and recounting it all in a book, The Way of the Crosses (2013). The title of Hurley’s book may have been inspired by a hybrid Irish-Romanian experience, signaled to the author by another Irishman, Shaun Davey, who, in 2009, composed music triggered by the “lyrics” of the epitaphs on the crosses in the Merry Cemetery of Săpânța, Romania. Travelling, being inspired by Romanian landscape and culture, with the background of the Irish writer’s “sense of place”, Hurley’s account is meant to reach audiences beyond the Romanian border and enable further interaction. The project of walking the way of the crosses and the writing about it, drawing maps and showing pictures fit in the Irish author’s preoccupations with bringing to the fore authentic traditional Romania. His travel writing becomes a means through which Romanian-Irish personal and collective memory are transmitted beyond boundaries, avoiding ideological perspectives, using elements such as Dacian pottery, Romanian ceramic production today and the story of the last family of potters in Maramureș. The translation of aspects of Romanian culture involves recalling legends, rituals, beliefs, stories, historical accounts, which are resituated in a trasnational context (for instance, haystack making in Maramureș and the West of Ireland, Romanian children in popular costumes playing with plastic Chinese-made toyguns, a Romanian peasant as the Last of the Mohicans). Hybridity also results from the author’s bilingualism (e.g. praying at a troiță in Romanian and translating the prayer into English in the book or keeping theRomanian words for “traistă”, “horincă”, “zacuscă”, “șindrile”).

Griffith Review

Although globalization brings different countries and cultures in closer and closer contact, people are still sensitive when it comes to aspects such as cultural specificity or ethnicity. The collapse of communism and the extension of the European Union have determined an increase of interest in Romania's image, both on the part of foreigners and of Romanians themselves. The purpose of this paper is to follow the development of Romania's image in English travelogues in the last hundred years, its evolution from a land of " woods and water " in the pre-communist era to a " grand bazaar " in the post-communist one, with clear attempts, in recent years, to rediscover a more idyllic picture of the country, one that should encourage ecological tourism. The article is also intended to illustrate the extra-textual (historical, economic, cultural) factors that have impacted, in different ways, on this image evolution.

Korstanje. M 2015 "TRavel Literature" # Springer International Publishing Switzerland J. Jafari, H. Xiao (eds.), Encyclopedia of Tourism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01669-6_595-1

2013

Social Change Review, Vol. 12(1): 43-71 , 2014

The paper analyzes transnational Romanians’ stories about their first trip abroad. The concept of physical mobility is seen in a broader framework for understanding transnational and cosmopolitan behaviours as well as international migration. In order to distinguish between different types of travelling for the first trip abroad the article is constructed keeping in mind the structural changes and constraints regarding physical mobility for Romanian citizens. During the process of transition from a communist country to the status of EU member, Romanian citizens’ stories about travelling abroad for the first time fundamentally changed. Labour migrants, asylum seekers, business travellers, students or tourists left the countries with different expectations and faced different problems at destination. Their attitudes toward origin and destination framed their images about the first trip abroad. Using a qualitative approach and samples of Romanians who live in Denmark, Germany, Italy, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom, the analysis emphasizes certain differences between different types of travelling for the first time abroad and reconstructs how Romanians started their transnational careers.

HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES – Journal of Studies and Research in Human Geography, 2011

To be able to promote itself efficiently on the market, a destination, given the marketing perspective-has to be aware about the authentic and crucial elements of its own identity as being the only way to transfer, virtually and materially, of what it has best-the social-cultural and artistic identity (which, from a tourist perspective, represents its perceived image, along with psychological and artistic image of the destination). Hence without a detailed knowledge of this aspect, the promotion leads to a presentation of a distorted image of the destination which, in time, can distort the socio-cultural identity of the inhabitants of that region. To build the image of a destination (a notoriously long and complex process), begins with the need to profoundly understand tourists' complexity of expectations (both functional and psychological) and, on their basis, to use these as attributes of the destination in order to improve attractiveness. In Romania's case such an aspect gains more importance due to the fact that, after the 1989, young generation, an important population segment, seem to register a continuous and dangerous process of "identity erosion", which over time could result into disconnecting from the essence of the Romanian spirit, not being able to understand or even ignoring sense of belonging, sense of identity, heritage and "tourism heritage".

Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2023

This paper discusses the import of “theory-fiction” in contemporary Romanian culture, by analysing the textual and artistic output of the performance artists Alina Popa and Florin Flueraș. The first part introduces the key methodological concepts used in the text, such as Edward Said’s notion of “travelling theory”, and some considerations regarding “theory-fiction”, which is a hybrid discourse at the intersection of theory and fiction. I begin the paper by offering some background information about the works of the two above-mentioned artists. Then, I examine some of the most important texts and performances by Popa and Flueraș in light of an essential mechanism deployed by “theory-fiction”, namely “hyperstition”. Lastly, I return to Said’s concept of “travelling theory” and attempt to expand it by proposing a new notion, that of “travelling theory-fiction” based on Popa and Flueraș’s case. This latter term considers both the intermedial nature of the artists’ usage of “theory-fiction” and the autochthonous socio-cultural context in which they introduce this discourse.