When I was reading the article on Chernobyl and “dark tourism,” one of the first things that struck me was just how little I know about Chernobyl beyond its role in media as a creepy, dangerous, yet fascinating place to visit. I hadn’t noticed it before, but almost all (or actually all) of my extremely limited knowledge of the Chernobyl disaster came from the few interactions I’d had with heavily dramatized movies or other fictionalized forms of media about this historical event. I realize that this event occurred almost a decade before I was born and I never learned about it in school or anything, but that’s particularly why the media was my one source of information about the Chernobyl accident. In the Yankovska and Hannam article, something that particularly stuck out to me was this fascination with death and tragedy that some people have when it comes to dark tourism, even to the point of personally interacting with the local residents of the site where the tragedy happened, in this case the tour guides’ family members, in order for these tourists to gain some sort of satisfaction that they have heard the “real” story.
Continuing with this theme, the article states that “the media has made the site of the Chernobyl exclusion zone even ‘more tragic’ and ‘exciting’ for tourists” (936), which I think has only furthered the exploitation of this place (and others like it) and the people who have lived and had experiences there, especially when the tour guides and their families feel like they have to embellish their own stories for the entertainment of their visitors. I don’t think that every instance of dark tourism is necessarily harmful; I just think that people should be more aware of their intentions when they are entering a place like Chernobyl (or other memorials, like we discussed when we talked about Yolocaust) that has a tragic history for a lot of people.