Painted houses - a genesis for local rural cultural heritage and
augmentation of a tourism-based community? A KPA analysis in
Ciocănești Commune, Romania
1 Ștefan cel Mare University of Suceava, Romania 2Bucharest University, Romania
Pages:
28 - 41
Publishing date:
22 December 2020
Abstract:
Whereas, numerous studies have analyzed cultural objectives
with lengthy histories turned into tourism attractions, either in urban or
rural settlements, the present research is focused on study the interaction
between tourism with the augmentation of local cultural heritage (LCH)
based on painted houses after the famous inscribed eggs, internationally
known and traditional costumes, in a Romanian mountain village. To this
end, the paper examines knowledge, perception and attitude (KPA) of local
community in the case of Ciocănești village, located in Northern Romania,
using a survey on 171 residents. In order to test our hypothesis, descriptive
statistics and stepwise regression method were applied in SPSS v17. The
results revealed that the knowledge about local heritage and how it should
be preserved and capitalized in the tourism industry are relatively high, but
they may be improved for a sustainable tourism development through the
augmentation of education and experience acquired in the residence area.
While good knowledge influence positively the perception, the gaps
between expectations for local heritage impact on tourism development
result perception in a negative way. The positive perception generates a
protective attitude for the local heritage but less proactive in tourism
business. Hence, a real need was raised by locals to receive financial
support by EU specific instruments of funding of sustainable tourism. This
case study could be an example of augmentation of tourism based on the
sustainable action of local heritage conservation for other rural community.
In the same time, it reveals the needs for the improvement of heritage
tourism management.
Keywords:
local community, cultural heritage, tourism, Romania, KPA.