CULTURAL LANDSCAPE AND HISTORICAL HERITAGE IN ARMENIAN TOURISM: BETWEEN IDENTITY AND NATION(ALISM)

Armenians have always represented a Christian and Indo-european “outpost” in a mainly Islamic and Turkish speaking regional environment. That’s why religious identity has always played a significant role, contributing to the survival of the cultural element in an alien and often hostile context. What is striking in the Armenian “parabola” is the contrast between the universal character of its historical and cultural heritage and the demographic, economic and political borderline status of its actual State. Armenian borderline status turns into an almost “claustrophobic” isolation when looking at its borders and international relations: an inner and mountain State, lacking in energy resources, under an embargo by Azerbaijan and Turkey after the Nagorno-Karabakh war, an unsolved question heavily affecting the political and economical development of the country and of the whole region (Zarrilli, 2000), Armenia finds its main political raison d'être in being Russia’s transcaucasian satellite. Invigorating the tourist industry could help to lessen international isolation. In this respect the gap between the country’s potential and its actual development is still large, and the product “Armenia”, once a famous destination of Soviet tourism, is still lacking worldwide promotion. For centuries Armenian culture has been generating a very peculiar landscape, dominated by material evidence of religiousness (religious architecture, khatchkars) and completed by an impressive iconography. On such a base governmental institutions and private operators are starting promoting a “niche” tourism, addressing a public willing to experience unusual routes of cultural tourism. This paper aims to highlight the strong interdependence that can be found in Armenia between the two domains of tourism and “nationality”, and to do so from a double point of view. First, the origin of tourists: tourists beginning a journey in the “kingdom of shouting stones”, as Mandel’štam called Armenia (Mandel’štam, 1988), are mainly, as we’ll find out later on, people of Armenian origins visiting their “motherland”, apart from a small group of aficionados of odd destinantions. Secondly, the iconographic display in the meaning of Gottmann (Gottmann, 1952): although the features of the cultural landscape and the national iconography, that will be specified later on, are on one hand the attraction features on which a destination branding must be based, on the other they represent the identity references on which a nationalistic rethoric is often based, aiming to stress the cultural and geo-political opposition between Christian, Indo-european Armenia and the hostile regional context, Turkish in its language and culture, seizing it from West and East.