IInnovations and Reproductions in Cultures and Societies
(IRICS) Vienna, 9 - 11 december 2005

 
<< Border Zones: Travel, Fantasy and Representation

Counting the Costs

David Jenkins (Plovdiv University, Bulgaria)

 

ABSTRACT:

Compared to most of the European Union, Bulgaria is a poor country. But one sector of Bulgaria is booming: coastal real estate. With grand promises of quick returns on investments in grand hotels, agents vie for Russian and Western European investors, as summer vacationers on package plans fill the hotels. Bulgaria’s Black Sea resorts have long been popular vacation destinations, and tourism the country’s preeminent industry, any time of year. But the pace of beachfront resort construction these days is entirely unprecedented. With reference to such writers as Clifford Geertz, Neil Acheson, Roland Barthes, and Tom Wolfe, and relying on the Bulgarian popular press, supplemented by personal interviews, this presentation will combine "thick description" of a day at Sunny Beach with sociological and "mythological" analysis, in an attempt to gain some understanding of the feverish enterprise currently transforming the Bulgarian coastal resorts into a megalopolis stretching from Balchik to Tsarevo.


Innovations and Reproductions in Cultures and Societies
(IRICS) Vienna, 9 - 11 december 2005

H O M E
WEBDESIGN: Peter R. Horn 2005-09-29