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shrine
A shrine is an object or place sacred to a religion.
The term may also refer to a place of national or
patriotic importance. A shrine originally meant a
box or chest that contained holy objects. It later
came to mean the place where such a container is
kept. It is also any structure built on a place
considered holy because some significant religious
event happened there. In addition, shrines may be
built to honour a saint or a virtue. In many
countries in the world, there are national shrines
built to honour the memory of national heroes or
battles for freedom. The best known monument of
this type is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,
created after the First World War by the governments
of the Allied countries to honour the
memory of many unidentified soldiers killed in
battles.
Shrines are organised in a similar way in most
places. Apart of the main sacred place within the
shrine, there is very often a bustling town, a more
or less highly developed commercial centre where
visitors reside, relax and shop. The shops sell
everything that a tourist or pilgrim would need,
as well as all kinds of religious souvenirs and other
goods. The shrines become attractions and thus the
reason for large numbers of tourists, believers and
non-believers alike, sacred or secular, who are
drawn to them.
For religious persons, shrines are places where
many miracles are said to have been performed.
Hundreds of thousands of ill and disabled men and
women have made pilgrimages to such shrines;
many have left their crutches in the church as
tokens of their healing. These visitors to shrines
usually distinguish themselves from tourists, who
are seen as not deeply interested in the religious
meanings and rituals taking place within the shrine.
But at night, for example, little difference can be
observed between pilgrims and tourists in the way
they relax. Moreover, in many of the popular
shrines tourists are presented to the essential
meaning of the shrine.
BORIS VUKONIC Â ,CROATIA
sight
Places and structures which are considered worth
seeing are known as sights. Natural sights such as
beaches, lakes, forests, rivers, waterfalls and
mountains are visited for their beauty. Cultural/
historic sights and shrines are mostly buildings
and monuments, the results of human culture and
history at work, and are appreciated as symbols of
mankind's greatness. Built sights such as theme
parks are mostly created for entertainment and
commercial value.
sightseeing
sightseeing 533
HUBERT B. VAN HOOF, USA
The term sightseeing refers to the act of visiting a
location or locations during the course of a journey
or as the point of the journey to look at objects.
These objects will range in type from works of art
and buildings, including national monuments as
well as those of architectural interest, to people
involved in some form of performance or display
about their culture, present or historical, or in the
conduct of their daily lives. In this latter respect,
which can also apply to the static matters, the
objects involved in sightseeing can be both part of
the official tourist itinerary and even outside of it.
Regardless of the situation, what ties them all
together is that they are seen as `representations' of
the destinations, the peoples of the destinations,
and thus of the touristic experience itself. The
majority of the objects that are displayed or
become the focus of tourist attention do so because
they are listed in guidebooks, itineraries, or
mediated to the tourist through the likes of tour
operator representatives.
`To do a bit of sightseeing' is an integral part of a
holiday for the mass tourist populations in the sun,
sand, sea and sex category. However, there has
not always been an association between travel/
tourism and sightseeing. As Adler �1989) points out
the sight has been conceived in different ways
during the development of tourism, and the
importance of visualisation is also linked to changes