Between authenticity of walls and authenticity of tourists’ experiences: The tale of three Polish castles

Abstract

Authenticity of local culture is often a subject of research, especially by tourism sociologists and anthropologists. However, what is most often discussed is authenticity of the intangible culture, like traditions and language. Still, those measures cannot be simply implemented to the analysis of material elements of culture and history. Here, the term is perceived as multifaceted and has as many meanings as in the case of intangible culture, but it has not been researched so deeply yet. Authenticity might be perceived here as an objective feature of the item resulting from no changes past the time. Apart from constructive and existential, this objective approach to authenticity in tourism is one of the three major ways of understanding the term. This can be illustrated by the case studies of three Polish castles: the Royal Castle in Warsaw, which was rebuilt completely after the World War II, the Bobolice Castle, which was rebuilt after several hundred years of being ruined and the fake of the medieval Pszczyna Knights Stronghold, created recently. In each of the cases, tourists’ experiences are concentrated on different elements and the authenticity of their experiences is substantially different. All examples, but especially the Pszczyna Stronghold, maybe a good starting point for the discussion about staged authenticity of tangible heritage in tourism. Content analysis of social media, press and travel agencies catalogs was conducted to demonstrate how authenticity of particular castles is perceived by their visitors and how this perception influences customer memorable experiences.