Visegrad. Between stone and words.
I am currently working on the Tourism Development Strategy for the municipality of Visegrad. When you deal with the strategic planning of a destination, you inevitably face numbers, capacities and infrastructure. Visegrad has weight.
Visegrad is anything but ordinary.
That is why, for the first time since secondary school, I took The Bridge on the Drina down from the shelf. This time, I admit, not superficially and out of duty, not as a student, but as a tourism professional with decades of experience. And I realised one thing: Ivo Andric wrote the most important branding guide for this place that we will ever have.
In school, Andric was an obligation — pages you flipped through with resistance, whether we admit it or not. Those were sentences whose weight I could not carry, because I was not old enough to understand what “duration” means. Then it was an assignment. Today, as I think about the concept of Visegrad’s tourism product, I read the same book with different eyes. The eyes of someone who understands that a destination must also be an emotion.
The bridge of Visegrad, the masterpiece of Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic, is for some passers-by only a photogenic spot; for others it is proof that an individual can leave a work that outlives politics, borders and time.
UNESCO recognition, which will soon mark twenty years, is an obligation, a status, and today also a marketing tool. Why an obligation? Because we are obliged to tell visitors about encounters, suffering and hope. We are obliged to pass on the emotion.
Visegrad is anything but ordinary.
We often forget the power of the fact that we have a Nobel laureate. That prestigious award, never repeated in these parts, confirms that the story of the Drina is universal — and Andric becomes the translator of our complex history into a language the world can understand.
“A people remembers and retells what it can grasp and what it manages to turn into legend. Everything else passes it by without a deeper trace, with the indifference of nameless natural phenomena; it does not stir the imagination and does not remain in memory.”
When a foreign visitor comes to Visegrad, they want to feel the universality of a small place and a great story. That is the essence of what we call “storytelling” in tourism. Andric left us a gold mine of stories; it is up to us to tell them in a way today’s guest understands.
As I walk through Visegrad, I see layers that sometimes conflict, yet together form a complete offer. On one side there is the modest house of Andric’s childhood and his classroom — authentic witnesses to the forming of a genius. And there is the powerful green Drina.
On the other side, at the mouth of the Rzav, stands Andricgrad. Emir Kusturica’s vision.
Tourism today asks for content. Critics say Andricgrad commercialises the myth, but visitors find an experience there.
Visegrad is anything but ordinary.
Visegrad will not spoil you with a simple story. It offers the bridge as authenticity and Andricgrad as content. And it is precisely that blend of old and new, the silence of the bridge and the bustle of the town, that keeps the destination alive.
As I write, I keep asking myself — and answering — the same questions. What is tourism, and what are we actually selling?
Tourism does not ask for sterile beauty. It asks for authenticity. Depth. Emotion. Returning to Andric, I realised that a tourism development strategy must not be only about beds and roads. It must be about a return to understanding.
Our task is to bring the guest to the bridge not for a selfie, but to feel what Andric wrote in the silence of wartime Belgrade: that, as he says, “life is an incomprehensible miracle that is constantly spent and worn away, and yet endures and stands firm, like the bridge on the Drina.” That is the value Visegrad holds. That is the value we must offer the world we want to bring here.
And you — have you visited Visegrad lately, and have you felt the “weight” of time that Andric writes about?
Similar posts
A small case study in authenticity
At the green market in Trebinje, a sign reads "white garlic" next to what has always been called saransak or cesan. The green market has long been a synonym for gathering, a place of local supply and demand, conversation and commentary. For a long time people have stopped by as if by duty and bought home-grown produce. From Trebinje, or from a little farther away, from the neighbors. Why white garlic, and not saransak? Probably so they would not have to explain it to the buyer, so they would not have to repeat the same story to the tenth customer, so they would not waste time on a word half the people do not know. You call it what the customer calls it. You sell faster. But every time we replace a local name with a universal one, we lose something that is hard to bring back later. Saransak carries place, language, and the generations that called it that. White garlic is the same product, of course, but without a local address. When you sell saransak, you have sold a local product with an authentic name. You have gained an experience and new knowledge. When you sell white garlic, you have sold, or bought, white garlic you can find at your own market too. Saransak has an address; white garlic does not. Tourism lives from that address. From what cannot be bought at another market, in another town, at least not under that name. And not with the same value. And when we erase the word, we erase part of that value too. I am not talking about nostalgia. I am talking about a resource that disappears just as quickly as any other when no one protects it or uses it.
The tourism product that never made it into the brochures
In tourism we often talk about investment, hotels, accommodation capacity, attractions, and statistics. We measure arrivals, overnight stays, and revenue. Yet none of that is what a guest carries home in the backpack of memories. Let us start with ourselves. What makes us happy when we travel? I am sure most people give similar answers. We want the journey to pass without stress. Without unnecessary complications. We want to feel welcome, safe, and at ease. That is precisely why the tourist experience begins long before arrival at the accommodation. It does not begin on the road, at the airport, or, especially relevant for us, at the border crossing either, even though queues at border crossings during the tourist season are among the most serious obstacles to competitive tourism development in the region. When a traveler spends hours in a line in the sun or shut inside a bus, it is hard to expect them to rate the experience as pleasant. Time meant for rest turns into a test of patience, and the first impression of the trip becomes frustration. The issue of tourist buses is especially sensitive, where the ride to the destination is often shorter than the wait at the border. Such experiences leave a mark and often cancel out much of the effort invested in promotion or in developing the tourism offer, not to mention the effort invested by the agency. And that is where the tourism of feeling begins, because a tourist does not divide their experience into sectors and jurisdictions. They do not care whether the queue is the fault of border police, road infrastructure, a travel agency, or someone else. They remember only how they felt in that moment. If we fly, we are happy when there are no excessive crowds, when check-in goes quickly, and when the flight is safe and comfortable. When we reach the accommodation, we want a kind host to greet us, a clean room, no noise, and everything looking as it was presented at the time of booking. We care about the receptionist's smile and a good coffee. We care that the taxi arrives on time and that we feel safe walking through the city. In one of my earlier texts I wrote that a destination should be viewed as your own home, and the tourist as a guest coming into your house. When friends or family visit, we do not show them the furniture. We try to make them feel comfortable, welcome, and relaxed. The same should apply to destinations. A tourist wants to feel the atmosphere of a place, meet people, try local food, walk the streets, and for a few days become part of everyday local life. A personalized approach to the guest is a tourism product The tourist experience begins long before the tourist arrives in person. We do not know when someone first caught themselves thinking, I am going there. When exactly we invited them, who invited them, and how many times we invited them before the decisive moment. That is why the invitation to tourists begins with the way our city streets are arranged, with the cleanliness of promenades, with flowers, with the safety we promise. It begins with how we dispose of waste, with our attitude toward nature. It begins with the culture of how we treat one another. With the service and the offer they have researched. When they arrive, a guest quickly senses whether they are welcome somewhere. They sense the waiter, the receptionist, the taxi driver, the shopkeeper, the guide, the grandmother at the market, the clerk at the exchange office, and the passerby they asked for directions. A destination's reputation is built precisely in those encounters. That is why I believe the future of tourism will not belong to destinations with the most attractions, but to those that best understand people. Those who learn to manage guests' feelings. Those who work on emotion. And that is exactly why a personalized approach to the guest should never be seen as an added value of the tourism product, because it is a tourism product in itself.
The destination as home
Imagine a tourist destination as your own home, and the tourist as a guest who brings gifts into that house: their money, time, trust, and a recommendation to others. We often tend to trivialize the word "tourist", treating them as someone who stops by to "sleep over" and "see a few things". Yet today's traveler seeks far more than a quick tour and wants to know where we sleep, what we eat, where we go out, what our courtyards, streets, and riverbanks look like. They want to try our food, walk our paths, and meet our people. In short, they want to become part of our everyday life for a few days, and they are ready to pay fairly for it. Even by a rough estimate, the average tourist in our destination leaves about 100 euros a day. That amount is quickly and easily distributed through the local economy, from bed and breakfast, through morning coffee and lunch at a restaurant, all the way to a taxi or car rental, fuel, souvenirs, local products, and the like. And how do we behave when we expect guests in our own house? We do not leave dirty socks in the middle of the room, we do not pile garbage bags behind the door, and we certainly do not throw an old mattress into the yard. We tidy up, air the rooms, wipe away the dust, and often buy flowers for the table. With that gesture we show respect both for ourselves and for the person arriving. Why, then, should it be any different with our destination? Why is it acceptable that containers overflow, that plastic and trash pile up along rivers and lakes, right beside the roads tourists use, and our children walk every day? If we carefully protect our living room, why does a riverbank serve as a dump? If we would clear things around the house so a guest does not have to step over them, how can we in good conscience leave trash on the shore and naively expect no one will notice? Statistics and global trends do not forgive neglect. According to data from relevant tourism platforms and organizations, more than 70% of today's travelers directly take ecological awareness and cleanliness into account when choosing a destination. A bad review because of an illegal dump on the way to a viewpoint, or a photo of trash on social media, can wipe out dozens of good ratings in an instant. A tourist who stumbles over our carelessness rarely returns. To change this, we must understand that tourism is not only the business of tourism workers, the municipal utility company, or local hospitality operators; it is a reflection of the whole society. Change requires concrete steps, from stopping the habit of seeing public goods as somehow "someone else's", and realizing that riverbanks, forests, and streets are our own backyard, through competent services that must provide adequate infrastructure, because it is essential, and often it is precisely infrastructure that amplifies individual irresponsibility, to zero tolerance toward those who destroy, whether through civic initiatives that raise warnings or through stricter enforcement of legal penalties. A destination is a mirror of our culture of living. As much as we care about the place where we live, that is how much it will matter tomorrow to our guest. Cleanliness, order, and care for the environment must be the minimum of our personal and collective self-respect.