Festivals and cultural events – a destination attractor and a triggering factor of change in the post-communist Romanian landscape

Abstract

Festivals and cultural events became a fashionable trend after the 1989 Revolution in Romania engaging new audiences and re-engaging old ones in public socio-cultural manifestations. This cultural product was designed and was included by recent development policies and cultural agendas in the attempt to launch post-communist Romanian tourism products on the international market and counterpart the severe socio-economic transformation process Despite their novelty and enthusiastic support from behalf of administrative authorities these events generate less tourism attractiveness than expected and are often randomly mingled with different types of events within a local cultural agendas part of the ‘festivalisation’ process that characterized the democratic Romania after 1990. However festivals and cultural events may be considered an important triggering factor of change in the Romanian socio-economic transition process. Our study attempts to identify the form in which festivals and cultural events are to be found in the contemporary Romania and to extensively analyze the existing most important cultural event tourist destinations as the main reinventing and promoting centers of the continuously evolving and profoundly changed socioeconomic autochthonous landscape. Considering both the issues involved by a profoundly changed post-communist landscape and the overpower of mediatized gaze in tourism an extended analyses of the destination internet sites and of their cultural agendas was made from which positive and negative aspects for the large Romanian cities and their main events as cultural tourism attractors were detached.