Religious Contents of Popular Guidebooks: The Case of Catholic Cathedrals in South Central Europe

Abstract

A major feature of popular guidebooks is their impersonal, objective and systematic approach to providing reliable information and guidance to tourists and travelers. In Europe, visitors from Japan, China, Korea and India in the last decade have become important contributors to several national economies. Many are not familiar with the “Western culture” but are keen to admire its classic, millennia old expressions… Compared to the “classical” tourists, who originate in Europe and the North America, Asian visitors come from completely different cultural and religious backgrounds. Their knowledge of the Greek and Roman heritage and the Christian religion is limited. These differences should be taken into consideration when describing elements of any religious heritage in popular guidebooks. Our research focused on the descriptions of the major cathedrals of Austria (Vienna), Croatia (Zagreb), Hungary (Budapest) and Slovenia (Ljubljana), published in three international guidebooks (Lonely Planet, DK Eyewitness Guides, Rough Guides) for each country. We analyzed whether the publications (12 and 3 for each country) considered including basic information of the Catholic religion and if they provided non-Catholic-centered understandable descriptions of the related works of art. The results demonstrate that religious contents are minimal. In each, the nation-state’s major cathedral is pointed out as one of the prime tourist attractions of the country described. The churches unique artistic features are presented; their works and artistic meanings are placed in the foreground, however, basic information of the religious content of the works is completely missing. Frescoes, statues, paintings and other works of arts are placed in the artistic and societal time frame, but the guidebooks in general fail to provide descriptions of the religious stories presented, such as, for example, the Adoration of the Magi or the Coronation of Mary in the Viennese cathedral.