Off the Beaten Track? The Communist Legacy of East-Central Europe as a Tourism Resource

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The legacy of state socialism is one of many resources that Eastern Europe can harness for urban tourism. From rides in a Trabant to guided tours of authentic historical sites, “Communism Tours” aim to bring recent history to life through tangible experiences.
Even before 1989, Eastern Europe attracted Western tourists with the promise of a journey back in time. Horse-drawn carts on main streets and historic palaces inhabited by “ordinary” people—things long since swept away elsewhere by progress and capitalism—could still be experienced here first-hand. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, this search for the backward “otherness” of state socialism did not come to an end. On the contrary, the material remnants of communism themselves now became the core of a new market niche: Communist heritage tourism.
As monumental buildings, memorials, and propagandistic slogans were dismantled, a new generation of entrepreneurs began transforming this newly anachronistic legacy into products for international tourism. The trend, which began in Berlin and quickly spread eastwards, has long since outgrown its niche status. Alongside attractions such as the Berlin Wall or 
Budapest

Budapest (population 2025: 1,676,000) is the capital and largest city in Hungary. It is located in the center of the country, on the Danube. Budapest was formed from the merger of the cities of Buda on the left bank and Pest on the right bank of the Danube. Pest was already the capital of Hungary from the beginning of the 11th century and from the 13th century often alternated in this function with Buda. When the both cities were merged as Pest-Buda during the revolution in Hungary in 1848, they already formed a single entity. After the restoration of the monarchy (from 1526 as part of the Habsburg Monarchy), however, this merger was abolished in 1849 and re-established 1873. In this context the Hungarians replaced the Germans as the majority in the city. After the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918, Budapest remained the capital of a now independent Hungary. After Hungary's entry into the Second World War on the side of the German Reich in 1941, most of the city's Jews were ghettoized in 1944 and later deported to concentration camps or murdered. The 1956 popular uprising against Soviet tutelage in Hungary began in Budapest. In connection with the uprising and its suppression, the capital lost around 70,000 people. Today, Budapest is not only the country's largest economic and cultural center, but also one of the most important in East Central Europe.

 Memento Park (formerly Szoborpark Múzeum), where decommissioned statues from across 
Hungary
hun. Magyarország, deu. Ungarn

Hungary (population in 2025: 9,488,428) is a state in Central Europe with Budapest as its capital. For several centuries, the country was part of the so-called Habsburg Empire, which was known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1867 until its dissolution in connection with World War I in 1918. Hungary has been a member of the European Union since May 1, 2004. The country’s largest river is the Danube. Hungary is one of the few landlocked countries in Europe.

 have been on display since 1993, a wide range of state museums and private retro exhibitions has emerged, as well as restaurants and hotels that trade on an “Eastern Bloc” ambience. This now highly diversified market includes everything from Berlin’s Trabi safaris to app-based escape games and numerous “communism tours” on foot or by car.1

Inventing Communism Tours: the “Crazy Guides” in Kraków

The first to market such tours on a larger scale were the “Crazy Guides” in 
Kraków
deu. Krakau, eng. Cracow

Cracow (population in 2025: 816,614) is Poland’s second-largest city and is located on the Vistula River in the Lesser Poland Voivodeship in the south of the country. The city was founded before the 11th century and was one of the country’s major centers of power from an early stage. From 1320 to 1795, it was formally the country’s capital. Cracow is one of the country’s most important industrial and cultural centers. The city is known for its Main Market Square with the Cloth Hall and Wawel Castle in Cracow’s Old Town, which has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1978. Cracow is also home to the Jagiellonian University, which is the oldest one in Poland.

. Since 2004, they have been taking customers in original cars (such as a Trabant or a Polski Fiat) from the city center out to the district of 
pol. Nowa Huta

Nowa Huta is a district in the northeast of Cracow. It was established in 1949 on the territory of the commune of Mogiła as a housing estate for the workers of the Lenin Steelworks (now ArcelorMittal Poland), which was being built at the same time. In 1951, the area of the housing estate and of the steelworks was incorporated into Cracow. The steelworks complex, which began operations in 1954, was one of the largest facilities of its kind in Europe.

, which was built in the early 1950s as a residential settlement for the nearby steelworks combine. Stops on the tour include Plac Centralny Plac Centralny Plac Centralny (since 2004, officially named Plac Centralny im. Ronalda Reagana, meaning “Central Square named after Ronald Reagan”) forms the urban center of Nowa Huta, the socialist planned district of Kraków. The square was laid out from the late 1940s onward as the hub of an axial street system. Its architecture is in the style of Socialist Realism. , where a statue of Vladimir Lenin stood until 1989, the gates of the steelworks, an IS-2 tank from the Second World War displayed as a monument, and the “Church of Our Lady, Queen of Poland” (Polish: Kościół Matki Bożej Królowej Polski) “Church of Our Lady, Queen of Poland” (Polish: Kościół Matki Bożej Królowej Polski) This Roman Catholic church was built in the 1960s and 1970s in Nowa Huta, which had originally been planned as a model socialist district without churches or religious symbols. On the site where it now stands, members of the parish—founded in 1952—had gathered at a wooden cross to pray, leading to confrontations with the authorities. The church was designed by Wojciech Pietrzyk, who drew on the architectural language of Notre Dame du Haut by Le Corbusier. , consecrated in 1977. Its construction is said to have been secured by Karol Wojtyła—later Pope John Paul II—against the wishes of the state authorities. The tour also includes a visit to the restaurant Stylowa, which proudly displays its preserved “PRL charm”—its socialist-era ambience.
Today’s tours are the result of years of refinement and standardization. In the early days, the company’s founder, Michał Ostrowski—known as “Crazy Mike”—personally led tours through Nowa Huta, dressed as a stereotypical 1990s capitalist complete with suit and cigar, and serving pickled cucumbers with vodka in a private apartment. Today, he works with a whole team of tour guides, most of whom were born in the 1980s or later. The tours can be booked in a variety of formats and have been featured in a range of international media from the BBC and Der Spiegel to Lonely Planet. As pioneers of experiential tourism in Kraków, the “Crazy Guides” have also attracted considerable attention from cultural anthropologists, who largely interpret the tours as an ironic, carnivalesque engagement with the “difficult heritage” of communism and see the “Crazy Guides” among other things as local actors seeking to improve the district’s image.2

Tracing Communism in Central Prague

While the “Crazy Guides” have deliberately kept their tours away from landmarks such as Wawel Castle and the Cloth Hall in Kraków, communism-themed tours in Prague usually take visitors straight through the city center, which is heavily affected by overtourism. Although hardly any buildings dating from the period between 1948 and 1989 can be seen in either the Old Town or the New Town, providers here, too, advertise their tours as offering insights into “communism.”
Tour guides seek to fulfil this promise by shifting perspectives—for instance, by focusing not on the architectural heritage of specific sites, but on their significance as historical settings. Thus, on Prague’s Old Town Square, it is neither the monumental Jan Hus Jan Hus Jan Hus was an early fifteenth-century theologian from Bohemia who preached in Czech and is regarded as a forerunner of the Reformation. The memorial was inaugurated in 1915 on the Old Town Square in Prague to mark the 500th anniversary of his execution as a heretic. It formed a symbolic counterpoint to the Marian column formerly located there and stood for Czech national identity within the Habsburg Empire. Memorial nor the Church of Our Lady before Týn Church of Our Lady before Týn This Gothic church became an important center for the Hussites in the fifteenth century—the reform movement inspired by Jan Hus that was primarily active in Bohemia. that take center stage, but rather a balcony from which Klement Gottwald Klement Gottwald Klement Gottwald (1896–1953) was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. A native Czech, in 1929, he was elected General Secretary of the 5th KSC Party Congress and pushed through a Moscow-loyal course for the party. From 1929, he represented the KSC in the Czechoslovak parliament. Living in exile from 1939 to 1945in the Soviet Union. In the Košice government (1945–1946), he held the office of deputy prime minister. Later heading the government from 1946 to 1948after which he became president of Czechoslovakia (1948–1953) following Beneš's resignation. is said to have spoken in 1948. Wenceslas Square, in turn, is presented above all as the site where tanks rolled in 1968, where Jan Palach Jan Palach A student at Charles University who set himself on fire on January 16, 1969, in Wenceslas Square in Prague in protest against the suppression of the so-called Prague Spring. Through his act, he sought to rekindle active resistance to the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. Palach succumbed to his severe injuries and died on January 19, 1969. set himself on fire in 1969, and where crowds gathered in 1989 for the  Velvet Revolution
Velvet Revolution
also:
Gentle Revolution
Events related to the political system change in Czechoslovakia from real socialism to democracy in November and December 1989. The Velvet Revolution was triggered by a student demonstration that was violently broken up and the subsequent student strike in mid-November, and culminated in nationwide demonstrations and a brief general strike in which the majority of the Czechoslovak population took part.
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At the same time, Prague also offers a few surviving “time capsules” of state socialism—for example, the canteen Světozor, where Czech dishes are still served cafeteria-style, or a number of bunkers, such as the one in the basement of the Hotel Jalta Hotel Jalta This prestigious hotel, designed by the architect Antonín Tenzer and built between 1954 and 1958, primarily accommodated international guests. , located right on Wenceslas Square.
Although these “alternative” tours of Prague avoid conventional tourist attractions—or at least present them from unusual perspectives—it is hardly surprising that they are still promoted using familiar superlatives. For instance, the operator Prague Special Tours advertises its “Prague Communism and Nuclear Bunker Tour” as a sequence of highlights, including “stories of terror, propaganda, political prisoners, executions,” “spies & lies, the biggest statue of Stalin ever built in the world,” and “a real nuclear bunker from the 1950s, hidden four floors underground, built for 5,000 people to survive a nuclear blast behind a four-ton door”3.

A “Western Gaze” on “the East”

These tours are clearly geared towards a Western audience—not least because they are generally conducted in English. The “Crazy Guides” explicitly address “foreign tourists who grew up on the other side of the Iron Curtain”4. On their website, they openly acknowledge that not only the original impetus for the venture but also its start-up capital came from an American couple.5 Meanwhile, in Prague, many tour operators work with guides whose first language is English, and even the Museum of Communism was founded by the American businessman Glenn Spicker, who assembled its collection.6
Following this logic, the “communist history” of Kraków, Prague, and other cities is often told through familiar narratives and expectations that circulate far beyond the post-socialist region, many of them rooted in Cold War perceptions. Although these presentations have national specificities and vary in their details, a universal master narrative nevertheless emerges, one that exoticizes “the East” as a whole. State socialism appears as a time defined by the absence of capitalism and democracy, while the political upheaval of 1989 is cast as the triumph of liberalism over dictatorship. In this sense, there is an overarching narrative structure that, in Hayden White’s terms, might be described as a “romance”.7
 
For Czech history, James Krapfl has shown that, as early as the 1990s, this interpretation of the revolution as a “happy ending” began to be supplemented by alternative readings.8 And countervailing interpretations can also be found in the way these tours present the past. When guides speak about the ideological saturation of everyday life and the shortcomings of the planned economy, they often do so in the mode of satire: the era of state socialism is treated with irony. It becomes a bizarre age, and the daily maneuvering of ordinary people comes to resemble life in a comedy. Accordingly, the tours in Prague and Kraków also draw on motifs from films such as Miś (Teddy Bear, 1981) by Stanisław Bareja, Bony a klid (1987)9 by Vít Olmer, and Pelíšky (Cozy Dens, 1999) by Jan Hřebejk, which depict small acts of defiance against Party authorities.10
Humor and irony function here as a common thread, allowing nostalgia and the memory of dictatorship, affirmation and anti-communism, to easily coexist, while linking local and international memory discourses.

Experiencing History

As in other forms of heritage tourism, communism tours promise to bring history to life by taking visitors to “authentic” sites. The authenticity attributed to these places may lie both in their materiality and in the subjective sense they evoke of a direct connection to the past. In Prague, for example, guides take visitors primarily to sites associated with pivotal moments in history and use photographs from the time to help them imagine the events that took place there. A different kind of encounter is possible in Kraków/Nowa Huta, 
Warszawa
deu. Warschau, eng. Warsaw, yid. Varše, yid. וואַרשע, rus. Варшава, rus. Varšava, fra. Varsovie

Warsaw is the capital of Poland and also the largest city in the country (population in 2025: 1,866,729). It is located in the Mazovian Voivodeship on Poland's longest river, the Vistula. Warsaw first became the capital of the Polish-Lithuanian noble republic at the end of the 16th century, replacing Krakow, which had previously been the Polish capital. During the partitions of Poland-Lithuania, Warsaw was occupied several times and finally became part of the Prussian province of South Prussia for eleven years. From 1807 to 1815 the city was the capital of the Duchy of Warsaw, a short-lived Napoleonic satellite state; in the annexation of the Kingdom of Poland under Russian suzerainty (the so-called Congress Poland). It was not until the establishment of the Second Polish Republic after the end of World War I that Warsaw was again the capital of an independent Polish state.

At the beginning of World War II, Warsaw was conquered and occupied by the Wehrmacht only after intense fighting and a siege lasting several weeks. Even then, a five-digit number of inhabitants were killed and parts of the city, known not least for its numerous baroque palaces and parks, were already severely damaged. In the course of the subsequent oppression, persecution and murder of the Polish and Jewish population, by far the largest Jewish ghetto under German occupation was established in the form of the Warsaw Ghetto, which served as a collection camp for several hundred thousand people from the city, the surrounding area and even occupied foreign countries, and was also the starting point for deportation to labor and extermination camps.

As a result of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 18, 1943 and its suppression in early May 1943, the ghetto area was systematically destroyed and its last inhabitants deported and murdered. This was followed in the summer of 1944 by the Warsaw Uprising against the German occupation, which lasted two months and resulted in the deaths of almost two hundred thousand Poles, and after its suppression the rest of Warsaw was also systematically destroyed by German units.

In the post-war period, many historic buildings and downtown areas, including the Warsaw Royal Castle and the Old Town, were rebuilt - a process that continues to this day.

, or 
București
eng. Bucharest, deu. Bukarest, yid. buqarešṭ, yid. בוקארעשט

Bucharest (population in 2024: 1,709,458) is the capital of Romania. In 1659 Bucharest replaced Târgoviște as the capital of the Principality of Wallachia. After the unification of the Danubian principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia) under Ion Cuza in 1861, Bucharest became the capital of Romania in 1862. Within a short time, it had become by far the largest city in the Southeast European region between Budapest and Istanbul. Under King Carol I. (1866-1914) Bucharest underwent urban planning changes following Western trends, with palaces, boulevards, parks, Art Nouveau villas and electric lighting. Towards the end of the 19th century, the city also developed into an industrial and financial center. In 1916, during World War I, it was occupied by the Central Powers, with whom a peace treaty was signed in 1918. Between 1936 and 1940, a Parisian-style boulevard was built in Bucharest, which also earned the city the nicknames "Micul Paris" ("Little Paris") or "Paris of the East." In World War II, after a brief period of neutrality, Romania sided with the Germans after General Ion Antonescu and the fascist "Iron Guard" turned Romania into a "national-legionary state." When Antonescu was arrested by King Mihai 1944, this resulted in air raids by the Germans, which destroyed large parts of Bucharest. In 1977, an earthquake caused widespread damage. Beginning in 1984, communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu had parts of the historic old city demolished in order to build a large socialist center, but this was never completed after his execution and the fall of the communist regime in 1989. Bucharest is now the seventh largest city in the EU, of which Romania has been a member since 2007.

, where participants can experience first-hand the sensory impact of socialist urban planning.
In experience-oriented tours, the body itself becomes a tool for exploring certain aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain. Eating a simple meal in a socialist-era canteen, milk bar, or restaurant preserved with its original décor promises an experience of proletarian food culture, while riding in a retro car conveys a sense of the unreliability of products manufactured under socialism. Meanwhile, the technical devices displayed in amateur museums evoke the hardships of everyday life in the analog age. And in a bunker, even the oppression of dictatorship itself seems almost palpable. Steel doors weighing several tons, antiquated ventilation systems, rudimentary decontamination showers, narrow camp beds, and military paraphernalia recall prisons and labor camps. In this way, former shelters are transformed into claustrophobic spaces where Cold War scenarios of threat merge with stereotypes of a dangerous East.

Experiencing Oneself

Dean MacCannell argued that tourists yearn above all for a sense of wholeness beyond the routines of modern everyday life—a desire that, in his view, can be satisfied only by glimpsing behind the attractions that have been staged for them, into what he called “back regions.”11 Although tourism studies has since moved toward a more complex, constructivist understanding of authenticity, the “authentic self” remains a key marker of the meaningful tourist experience. According to Kjell Olsen, a sense of “existential” authenticity arises particularly when travelers have an opportunity to step outside their usual roles.12 One way this can happen is through participating in activities tourists would not normally engage in, including physical labor or time spent in uncomfortable places. It is one of the paradoxes of the tourism industry that it increasingly sells precisely these kinds of “non-touristic” experiences.
Many communism tours likewise tap into this desire to distance ourselves from our own role as a tourist. Marketed as “Off the Beaten Track” experiences, guides lead visitors into cramped, cold, or musty bunkers and warn them of the psychological reactions such spaces may provoke. They emphasize the “ugliness” of brutalist buildings and monotonous housing architecture, often blurring into forms of poverty tourism. Some of the highlights of these supposedly authentic “anti-tourist” experiences are things that would normally be cause for complaint—for example, a car breakdown, which the “Crazy Guides” mention in disclaimers as a possibility. When it actually happens, jointly pushing a broken-down car can itself become a source of authenticity in its own right.
 
The way “communist heritage” is performed in such moments stands in striking contrast to how heritage and tourism studies usually conceptualize the making of tourist attractions.13 Here, the relics of the past are not sacralized but trivialized, laughed at, and visiting them is staged as an insider tip.
English translation: William Connor

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