**2.3. Heritage tourism**

The concept of cultural heritage has been developing over a long period of time. Throughout different periods, the concepts of monumental and resource culture heritage can be distin‐ guished. The concept of monumental heritage can be traced back to the Renaissance concepts of *monumento* (*En.* monument) and *antichitá* (*En.* antique). Since the twentieth century, the change of this concept has been influenced by a change of the concept of an ethnic country, the forming international society, international law, legislative processes, processes of industrialisation and the historical events of this century that have shown that cultural heritage is fragile and irreversible. The second concept of cultural heritage formed several decades ago. According to this concept, heritage should not be identified with memorial signs because it plays a different role, i.e., it is a foundation on which modern culture – and inseparable part of human lifestyle and environment – grows and develops [16]. The concept of resources is used to define this conception of heritage. According to this conception, if heritage is defined by resources of the past, then they are limited and irreversible, which is why they should be preserved and spread onto future generations. The change of the conception of heritage was determined by various legal acts where the meaning and understanding of heritage underwent specification and explanation.

Recently, heritage is more and more often seen as a process which objects undergo or as a marketing tool [17]. It is mostly valuable to include those objects into the lists of heritage that are seen as valuable by people; therefore, much depends on the outlook of people and their disposition.

According to the UNESCO classification of heritage, there are seven main categories of heritage*: nature*, *landscape*, *monuments*, *artefacts*, *activity*, *people* and *locations*. None of these categories are perfectly defined because there are many objects of heritage that could be attributed to several categories. One of them is cultural heritage. According to the Charter for the Conservation of Places of Cultural Heritage of New Zealand, cultural heritage includes regions, landscape and features, structures, constructions and gardens, archaeological and traditional locations, sacred places and monuments that have long-term value and can be legally assessed, that teach people about the past and the culture of those who lived before, that give context to the identity of the society according to which people relate themselves to the world and to those who lived in the past, that provide the modern world with diversity and contrast and are a measure according to which people can compare modern achievements [18].

All cultural heritage objects are divided into intangible (movable) and tangible (immovable) (**Figure 3** [19]).

**Figure 3.** Classification of cultural heritage. Source: created by the author based on reference 19.

**Intangible cultural heritage** was first defined in 2003 during the UNESCO General Confer‐ ence, 32nd session in the adopted *Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage*. In 2003, UNESCO announced the tradition of the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Song festivals as a masterpiece of human oral and intangible cultural heritage.

On the international scale, the conception of tangible cultural heritage was first validated in the *Convention concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage* adopted during the 1972 UNESCO General Conference. According to this convention, *tangible cultural herit‐ age* stands for intangible objects that remain from the past and related locations; they have a historical, archaeological, mythological, memorial, religious, architectural, urban, artistic and scientific value (*Convention concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage* 1972).

The following are the objects that belong to tangible cultural heritage:

• Monuments (architectural, monumental sculptures and paintings, archaeological elements and structures, inscriptions that have exceptional value from the perspectives of art, history and science);

• Groups of buildings (groups of separate and related buildings whose architecture, homo‐ geneity or situation in the landscape gives them exceptional universal value from the per‐ spectives of history, art and science);

• Places (human or mixed nature and human creations, territories; also, archaeological locations that have exceptional universal value from the perspectives of history, aesthetics, ethnology and anthropology).

Tangible cultural heritage includes ensembles (isolated or related groups of buildings whose architecture also relates to the landscape), well-known places (creations of human beings and nature) and monuments divided further into the heritage of fine arts, archaeology and architecture which is especially important when analysing the aspects of the applicability of tangible cultural heritage.

According to M. Robinson, the concept of cultural heritage within the context of cultural tourism has changed and is still constantly changing [20]. Former industrial cities are now frequently visited by tourists. For instance, in Germany, the Ruhr region, former steel pro‐ duction and coal mine regions have become a tourist attraction network with museums, modern art galleries, publicly displayed works of art, parks and other facilities necessary for relaxation and leisure time of tourists. Moreover, locations of social trauma and former military conflicts are more and more frequently visited by tourists of any generation. Foreign tourists prefer going to residential districts in Belfast, North Ireland, where they can see colourful drawings left by members of militarised organisations; these drawings tell stories about not so old violence of political-religious groups in that location [21].

The application of cultural heritage objects to cultural tourism is more and more developed in different countries; cultural tourism is the most rapidly growing market segment. For example, in Finland, just as in the entire region of the Baltic States, castles are perceived as local, regional or national monuments and function as museums that have become tourist attraction centres. Currently, Finnish castles join local and international networks. Such networks include cooperation between castles and museums, local councils, companies and schools. Most of the exhibitions are directed towards the young visitors: "Heroes or Villains?" in the Turku castle; "The Good, the Bad and the Cool" in the Hamme castle. Another form of activities – happen‐ ings – introduces multidimensional local history, e.g., events "Epiphany of the Three Castles", "European Days" and special "Holiday Fair Days" [22]. Examples of application of various cultural heritage objects can be found in every country of the world where tourism becomes one of the main reasons and instruments in preserving heritage.

As the conception of cultural tourism is gaining popularity in Lithuania, the local government is beginning to value and cultivate heritage as an asset that is capable of helping to develop tourism and national identity.

Moreover, globalisation is gathering momentum, efforts to protect and nurture national cultural idiosyncrasy, identity and architectural heritage are becoming stronger. The preserved past and modern architecture directly reflects the state of a country, the progress of its culture and technics; it also influences the cultural consciousness of the society and social psychology. It is important to manage and preserve architectural heritage because it determines the level progress and sociability of the society and ensures social and economic stability of the country (**Table 5** [20]).


Source: created by the author based on reference [20].

**Table 5.** Benefit provided by heritage.

According to Graham, heritage may be employed to realise the role of at least another three aspects that are important from the perspective of marketing [23].

Analysing international studies on the **topic of Soviet heritage**, separate directions are evident. First of all, it is important to note that the literature provides two main **types of Soviet cultural tourism**:


This conception has been formed by the scientist of the University of Bucharest A. Caraba [24] who claims that the heritage of all communist countries (both former and existing) cannot be analysed on the basis of the same method because their histories are very different, especially because the European communist countries (excluding the former republics of Soviet Union) possessed regimes that have left a big scar in the societies of those countries, which in turn aggravates research of that particular period and objective evaluation of the communist period. According to the aforementioned author, China has experienced different fate; therefore, the communist heritage of this country is analysed separately; this is the first direction of Soviet heritage studies that comprises the absolute majority of all the studies and publications on the topic of the Soviet period [24]. The second direction which is mostly focused on cultural heritage tourism analyses the regime of such countries like North Korea or Cuba and its influence on tourism.

Discussions on the cultural value of objects – acknowledgement-negation, peculiarityforeignness, change-permanency, etc. – are especially important in evaluating the Soviet architectural heritage. Emphasising the meaningful aspect allows making an assumption that most of the problems that arise from assessing architecture from that period are mostly related to the architectural duality rather than issues of artistic value.

Therefore, in order to achieve a more objective assessment of architecture, it is very important to emphasise the viewpoint that the impact of the Soviet past is not one-sided, i.e., despite the extremely political assessment of Soviet architecture, the architectural assets of that entire period cannot be bluntly related to the connotations of 'alien/strange/foreign'.

It is especially important to note that turning the architecture of the second half of the twentieth century into heritage is related to not only ideological context of the Soviet period, but also with factors that are more shared when a psychological problem of assessing the twentieth century architecture is faced: the society often fails to see the specific aesthetic value in these structures that were built not that long ago. Because this construction period is still alive in many people's memory, they do not feel any sentiments they should feel if they wanted to preserve them [25].

As Lithuania faces a strictly conservative attitude towards cultural values (cultural values that are newer than 50 years can be included into the registry of cultural values only as an excep‐ tion), other similar European countries (neighbouring Latvia, Estonia, Poland, also Romania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, former Yugoslavian countries, Albania) have been actively re‐ searching the impact of the Soviet period, the communist regimes and the benefit of its heritage on the development of the so-called 'red tourism' for almost 15 years, and they have also amended the architectural heritagisation practice [26].
