MEMORIAL TOURISM AS A PART OF TOURIST OFFER IN WAR AFFECTED COUNTRIES

Memorial tourism is a part of dark tourism and includes visits to sites marked by human suffering and widespread tragedy such as concentration camps, battlefields, places of great historical battles and places of natural disasters with a large number of victims. The main motivation in memorable tourism is education and empathy towards the victims. The development of memorial tourism is based on the very historical facts and the better interpretation of the same. Due to the social sensibility of resources on which tourism is based, the question arises: Can places of persecution become places for tourist visits, and thus generate profits? For the purpose of fining out a response to the question asked, research in the Republic of Croatia has been conducted, which in the past was exposed to major scale war conflicts. During the Homeland War, the eastern part of the Republic of Croatia was significantly more affected than the other parts of the country, so memorial tourism is the most represented in Eastern Croatia. One of the most important destinations of memorial tourism is Vukovar, whose tourist offer is mostly based on memorial tourism and achieves remarkable success. The memorial sites in Vukovar make up a whole - Vukovar's nocturnal. Good geographic position and the location of the city on important traffic directions create good prerequisites for further development of memorial tourism.