Thanatourism: A study on understanding tourist motivations who visit Gallipoli Peninsula Historical National Park

People are fascinated with death and disaster. One simply has to watch trafficslow to a crawl when passing a car accident to understand this. However, thisfascination goes beyond the side of a highway and enters the realm of tourism.Today, numerous sites (Auschwitz-Birkenau, The Somme, Oklahoma City,Gettysburg and Gallipoli Peninsula historical) of death and disaster attractmillions of visitors from all around the world.Due to the increasing popularity of this tourism product, a small number ofacademics have begun studying the phenomenon. Leading the field are Foley andLennon (1996: 198) who labeled it Dark Tourism, Seaton (1996: 240) who coinedthe term thanatourism, and Blom (2005: 32) who developed the concept of morbidtourism. We can basically define thanatourism term as, travel to a location wholly,or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death,(Seaton, 1996: 240). Some examples from the thanatourism sites; a place wheremass or individual deaths occurred (battlefields, concentrations camp, assassinatedplace of Kennedy in Dallas), graveyards, war memorials, and also thanatourisminclude travel to material evidence, or symbolic representations, of particulardeaths, in locations unconnected with their occurrence (The Holocaust Museum inWashington).Gallipoli Peninsula Historical National Park includes many deathphenomenons like, museum, battlefield, graveyard and monument. Nowadays, theregion attracts thousand of tourists all over the world first of all Australian, NewZealander and Turkish people. Because of this reasons, a survey applied tounderstand tourist motivation who visit Gallipoli Peninsula Historical NationalPark. Thus, we are going to understand why people visit thanatourism sites.