Paper short abstract:

This paper examins the relationship between tourist development, historical preservation funding, and political and economic change.

Paper long abstract:

In 1999 the historical center of Sighisoara, Romania, joined seven of the surrounding villages on UNESCO's World Heritage list as a well-preserved example of the Saxon culture in Southeast Transylvania. Tourism development as well as international interest in heritage preservation and the German Saxon culture have already been present here for years, contributing to the local post-socialist transformations.

The heritage status of these sites has enabled and oriented multiple articulations between the state, various international organizations and institutions, the local as well as a globalized symbolic and material economy. Instrumental to these articulations were several of the local institutional and individual actors which have tactically doubled as both businesses and NGOs, business owners and members in the local council, as well as the local economic and political elite.

In this paper, based on eighteen months of fieldwork, I examine and untangle the formal and informal practices and flows linking these separate spheres. I pay particular attention to how tourist development—understood as preparing the site, in many ways, for tourist consumption—has been a mediator for drawing in state and international institutions and their resources, and introducing them in the local economy in ways that produce and reinforce local elites and hierarchies.

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