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attempt to balance the attractiveness of regional specificity with persistent anxieties about

backwardness. In particular, a close reading of contemporary guidebooks, which attempted to focus

the attention of the tourist on specific sites or “markers,” reveals the inclusions and exclusions

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inherent in depictions of Volhynia.
Tourism was about marketing difference, which meant that the authors of Volhynian

guidebooks sought to make the province’s specific attributes appealing to outsiders. In particular,

they offered an expansive vision of national diversity that was unmatched in more central areas of

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Poland. Alongside descriptions of attractive and historical synagogues, Orłowicz depicted

Orthodox Christian sites, including the monastery of Pochaïvs’ka Lavra, which was visited by tens of

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thousands of pilgrims each year, as quintessential parts of the diverse cultural landscape. For
Orłowicz and other proponents of Volhynian tourism, however, this was to be a highly stage-

managed version of national and religious diversity, one in which internal exoticism could not be

mistaken for the “foreignness” that had caused such anxieties among Polish elites during the 1920s.

Indeed, if Volhynia exhibited the uniquely Polish trait of tolerance for diversity, the region’s

exoticism meant quite the opposite of foreignness—non-Polish sites, peoples, and traditions not only

might be included, but had to be included. Volhynian tourism, like tourism more generally across

Europe and north America at this time, was therefore developed according to prevailing ideas about

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what a burgeoning group of middle-class consumers might find both exotic and familiar. It seemed

a perfect way of negotiating the desired relationship between Poland and the kresy more generally.

86 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A new theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1975).
87 Rudy Koshar has shown how guidebooks can be analyzed as media that ask (and answer) questions about national
identity. See Koshar, “What Ought to Be Seen:’ Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany
and Europe,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 3 (1998): 332.
88 Orłowicz, Ilustrowany przewodnik, 342.
89 Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough (eds.), Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in
Modern Europe (Ann Arbor, 2001).

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