Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change

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Impossibility of authentic experience? The

existential estrangement which turns to
performance

Güney Serhat & Bünyamin Uzuncan

To cite this article: Güney Serhat & Bünyamin Uzuncan (2020): Impossibility of authentic
experience? The existential estrangement which turns to performance, Journal of Tourism and
Cultural Change, DOI: 10.1080/14766825.2020.1748637

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14766825.2020.1748637

Published online: 05 Apr 2020.

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JOURNAL OF TOURISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE
https://doi.org/10.1080/14766825.2020.1748637

Impossibility of authentic experience? The existential

estrangement which turns to performance
Güney Serhat and Bünyamin Uzuncan
Communications Faculty, Galatasaray University, Istanbul, Turkey

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Traveling to the Eastern cities of Turkey with Doğu Ekspresi (Eastern Received 22 September 2019
Express) has peaked in the last two years thanks especially to the Accepted 20 March 2020
social media effect alongside the several kind of offline
KEYWORDS
communication. In light of the notions of existential estrangement Authentic experience; auto-
and authentic experience, this research focuses on the ethnographic research;
characteristics of this specific travel, and the motivations of its backpackers; Doğu Ekspresi
travellers. Around an auto-ethnographic research through a 24- (Eastern Express); railway
hour journey followed by spending a full day in the city of
Erzurum we had the opportunity to examine the different aspects
of being a backpacker in the face of mass tourism, which is
usually disposed to penetrate every kind of authentic experience
search. The research also sheds light on the interaction between
the travellers, traveller and the locals, and traveller and the
destination itself. While the journey looks like a search for
existential escape through authenticity in the beginning, it may
involuntarily turn into a mass tourism activity in which potential
backpackers’ attitudes and behaviours are manipulated by
fundamental tourism habits mostly shaped around certain
commercial interests in different levels.

Rediscovery of the ‘Orient Express’: the Rush to the East

Things changed when a group of young Turkish tourists decided to do away with speed and
booked sleeping car reservations on the (Eastern Express) train. Naturally, they shared the
experience on social media. From that point onwards, the train became a venue for fun,
adventure, socializing and new experiences.

Reuters News Agency published a photo gallery with the explainer above at the end of last
year’s winter covering the stories of Eastern Express travellers. In 2017, almost 300 thou-
sand people travelled to Erzurum and Kars, which are two Eastern cities in Turkey –
second being a city bordering Armenia. This number is 40% more than what it was pre-
vious year. In the first three months of 2018, 80 thousand passengers reached Eastern Ana-
tolia via railway. However, the passengers were mostly not the locals who prefer safe,
cheap and comfortable public transportation, but rather travellers seeking adventure
with their backpacks.

CONTACT Serhat Güney hserhatguney@gmail.com Communications Faculty, Galatasaray University, Çırağan

Caddesi, No. 36 Ortaköy, Istanbul, Turkey
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 G. SERHAT AND B. UZUNCAN

With the Eastern Express being popular, these breaks have become quite colourful and
joyful, so that the usual nature of the train journey has begun to evolve onto a different
scale. During the 24-hour journey, the train also passes through so many ‘virgin areas’
including foothills, riverbeds, hanging valleys, old stone bridges, tunnels, and underpopu-
lated villages which have not been consumed on social media yet. On the one hand, the
nostalgic character of the train journey, the feeling of going away, and the authentic
experience of the journey form the main theme of ‘Doğu Ekskpresi Yapma (Making the
Eastern Express)’ concept. On the other hand, these travels to the East offer an opportunity
to reinvent the image of ‘East’ which was superficially created through only a number of
productions such as films, books, news, official reports, and scientific researches in the
West.
In the previous narratives, the country’s East is generally represented as an undeve-
loped place of exile in the middle of nowhere. The road to the Eastern lands ‘inhabited
by poor people who have lived similar lives for centuries’ has been typified as an
obscure, long and challenging journey. Unlike this imagination the fact that this journey
can be reproduced in a way that promises interesting and different experiences makes
it a consumable and showable travel experience. It can be seen that such day-long jour-
neys, which are spread via shares on social media and chain recommendations have
created new contexts, connections and interactions in terms of the tourism culture and
travel experience. In Turkey, along with the Eastern Express journey, alternative travel or
tourism activities such as plateau tourism and slow city visits propose new experiences
that break the patterns of traditional mass tourism and expand travel habits to different
spaces and places. Such forms of travel are in line with the selective consumption of
global capitalism as niche tourism products and are entitled to the claim of transformation
and inclusion of the backpacker phenomenon.
Although it is an emerging concept in Turkey, these activities have long been a hot
topic of discussion for international academia whether it is a usual tourism activity in
terms of travellers’ profile, travels’ destination and characteristics. With its cultural back-
ground, to be a ‘backpacker’ has been an autotelic activity which is quite appealing for
a long time. Their attitudes, behaviours, travel habits, motivations and interactions with
locals may give meaningful insight in relation with different fields of social sciences.
This paper will examine how Eastern Express backpackers are motivated to travel to
Turkey’s East within the frame of existential estrangement and authentic experience
with the help of an auto-ethnographic research. There are three main questions we
have tried to answer in this study: First, what makes the Eastern Express journey attractive
in terms of the desire to escape? Second, do authentic experiences that are expected to be
offered by the Eastern Express journey satisfy the hunger of existential divergence? Lastly,
are these experiences original, special, spontaneous and surprising?

In search of escape: an existential phenomenon

Cohen (1972) classifies tourist types into four categories; the organized mass tourist, the
individual mass tourist, the explorer and the drifter. Following this, it may be a matter
of debate whether the backpackers should be classified as explorers or drifters. Although
it has been discussed since the beginning of the 1990s in academia, Dayour, Park, and
Kimbu (2019) believe that the concept of ‘backpackers’ should be reconsidered
 JOURNAL OF TOURISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE 3

comprehensively. According to them, it is almost not possible to talk about the standard
and functional criteria that can identify backpackers. Pearce (1990), who brought the
concept of ‘backpacker’ to academic literature, defines backpackers as mostly young tra-
vellers who have a flexible travel calendar, an ‘informal’ and independent agenda; and
who prefer budget transportation and accommodation as well as communicating and
interacting with local people and other travellers. Similar activities were previously
called, for example in the 1950s, as wandering, tramping and drifting (Loker-Murphy &
Philip, 1995).
Particularly Pearce’s (1990) study has pioneered this notion to be a subject of many fol-
lowing studies. However, as Dayour et al. (2019) often emphasize, in the academic articles
or the texts published by the culture, tourism and other related institutions of the states,
there is not an exact definition of ‘backpackers’ especially in terms of demography, travel
types or times. Rather, their motivation to discovery is more likely to be distinctive, and the
common characteristic of backpackers. While Pearce (1990) sees travel motivation as
‘escape from the life’, de Botton (2002, p. 26) describes it as a ‘search of happiness’. In
his New York Trilogy, Paul Auster (2006, p. 108) states ‘It seems to me that I will always
be happy in the place where I am not.’ by referring Baudelaire’s search of happiness
outside of where he is not. It may be possible to explain this situation through an existen-
tial approach. Existentialism sees humankind as being thrown into a world full of mean-
inglessness, unconditional freedom, inevitable death and universal alienation (Tillich,
1952). The inevitable response to this existential dilemma is existential anxiety. Sartre
(1948) says by referring to the nineteenth-century philosopher Kierkegaard (1859) that
this is a dizzying anxiety of freedom. Heidegger (1962) sees this anxiety as a natural
answer to chaos in which man exists. This anxiety and motivation forces man to make
choices with the loneliness and reality brought by this existential situation (Sartre,
1969). At this point, travels can be regarded as a choice to be freed from the condition
where man is in as a result of existential anxiety. This situation, which may also be concep-
tualized as ‘existential divergence’, may be explained as a choice that people uses to
escape from, to get rid of or to at least delay existential inconvenience. This concept
may also mean that people, instead of facing the bitter truths of life, places a spatial
and temporal distance between himself and routine, ordinary, boring and stifling life
(Fromm, 1942).
Sørensen (2003) and Cohen (2011) discuss ‘existential divergence’ through a hedonic
approach by referring to backpackers. Along similar lines, Maoz (2007, p. 131) describes
them as backpackers traveling on the paths of existential divergence. Nevertheless, we
cannot conclude that the will and desire of existential divergence are enough to define
backpackers alone. In one aspect, the basis of modern tourism depends on an organized
perspective to respond to the human desire to escape. This perspective addresses regular
mass tourists who are not immune to wanting to get away, who can’t adopt the places
they go to, who merely run through the time they live far away from home and who
have the desire to return right away to where they came from. What makes backpackers
different is not only spatial and temporal distancing, but also that they update themselves
where they go, establish mutual relations with their social and physical environment,
move learning and existential distancing beyond time and space, and reform themselves
(Huang & Chen, 2015; Ooi & Laing, 2010; Paris & Teye, 2010). According to Grene (1952),
existential divergence is related to the ability to dive among the people in the travelled
4 G. SERHAT AND B. UZUNCAN

place, to disappear or to become one of those people. At this point, another concept that
completes the desire to move away comes into play: authentic experience. The desire of
the traveller to get away is in strong interaction with the motivation to experience auth-
enticity. The process of penetration into people, culture and nature is a natural extension
of existential divergence in a sense.

Making the far away closer: manufacturing authenticity

Duc des Esseintes, the main character in À rebours (Huysmans, 1884), is bored of Paris and
dreams of going to London. He goes to the train station in Paris, but there’s plenty of time
for the train to depart. Meanwhile, he goes to an English bookstore and buys a book about
London, and visits a wine house where the English people spend their time in Paris. He
then goes to an English restaurant near Saint Lazare. He orders roast beef, roast potatoes
and a little bit of English cheese. His body and soul are suddenly overwhelmed with
fatigue. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘If one can travel in his chair, what’s the point of moving?’ While
the smell, the air, the people, the food and even the cutlery of London are already by
his side, what else can he find in London? Des Esseintes loses the experience of the auth-
enticity of what he has been expecting. He gets back home and never leaves for the rest of
his life.
The word authentic, which is of French origin, has a close relationship with words such
as genuine, real, original, or essential. In Turkish, it means ‘having the characteristics that
existed in the past’ (2018). In academic literature, Kaygalak, Usta, and Günlü (2013)
described the notion as untouched, unaffected by modern influence, while Ayazlar and
Karakulak (2016) explain authenticity as sincerity, purity and naturalness. When we think
about this word in the context of travel and destination, untouched geographies,
untouched people and their life stories, cultures that have been left out of the globalizing
world may be considered authentic. In other words, these places are closed places which
are ethnically pure, culturally traditional; westernization or globalization affects there as
little as possible (Günal, 1998).
The existential divergence mostly brings with itself the interest and the need for auth-
entic experience. For the travellers, the point is to be included socially, culturally and phys-
ically in the geographies where they go, in the cultures and among the locals who are
adorned with unique life habits. Individuals or groups who are in search of authentic
experience pay attention to whether the locals are in line with the original local culture
and evaluate whether the culture is originally exhibited or not (Heitmann, 2011; Steiner
& Reisinger, 2006). According to Urry (2002), rural areas, for example, have a structure
which is rich in terms of old life habits and cultural values, and is suitable for the search
of authenticity by the post-modern individual.
On the other hand, places that have become a centre of attraction, due to the strong
influence of locality on authenticity, may change both the characteristics of the experi-
ences and the cultural identity of the host society. Rid, Ezeuduji, and Probstl-Haider
(2014) and Ezeuduji (2015) consider more concrete authentic experiences such as
tasting regional dishes, among the factors that may be effective in the journeys to the
authentic places. In particular, the economic expectations of local businesses play a
major role in this process (Wickerts, 2004). In other words, the high demand for authen-
ticity may force the emergence of a staged authenticity. Travellers’ time and space
 JOURNAL OF TOURISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE 5

constraints at the destination may lead to performances of a rapid and superficial of auth-
enticity. This situation causes the commercialization and banalization of culture, the imita-
tion and the transformation of authentic space and experience turning into a spectacle
(Demiroğlu & İzgi, 2007). According to MacCannell (1999), authenticity cannot be retained,
and it is not possible for tourists to escape from staged authenticity. Local people become
a part of this scene and stage their original culture as a spectacle in order to sell their social
and cultural atmosphere (Chhabra, Sills, & Cubbage, 2003).

Hitting the bricks: an auto-ethnographic analysis of voyages to the east

Eliot (1999, p. 343) states that Baudelaire created a new type of romantic nostalgia and that
he discovered the poetry of departures and of waiting rooms. Inspired by Baudelaire’s
poems, Edward Hopper completes a painting, in 1938, of a woman on a train ride titled
Compartment C Waggon 293. According to Elion de Botton (2002, p. 61), what attracts
Hopper’s attention to trains is the atmosphere of the wagons that draw their way
through nature, the state of the view that appears from the window with the repeated
rhythmic sounds that come from the train wheels that hit the rails and carry the
passengers.
The Eastern Express is a railway line, operated by the State Railways of the Republic of
Turkey, departing from Ankara and ending in Kars. Trains on this line cover a total of
1933 kilometres in 24.5 h. Trains have wagons with one single and two pairs of seats
called the Pullman in each row on the right and left sides. They also have double bed
wagons, four-person wagons and one dining wagon. In double bed wagons, there are
two double berths, a double sofa, an expandable table, a mini fridge, a hot - cold water
basin, an outlet, a hanging staircase and a small staircase for the upper bunk. Pillows,
duvets and bed linen are provided by TCDD. The dining wagon is designed as a restaurant
with the brand of, and the pricing of the restaurant may be considered cheap in Turkey.
The prices of these wagons are different. While sleeping car wagons cost 119,00 Turkish
lira, four-person wagons are 63.50 and regular Pullman wagons are 47.00 Turkish liras.
There are discounts for young people and certain civil servants.
Our main journey through the Eastern Express and a full-day in the city centre of
Erzurum turned into an auto-ethnographic experience which forms the backbone of
this study. In an ethnographic research, a number of methods including questionnaire,
observation and recording may be used for a single case study (Goulding, 2005).
However, while traditional ethnographic field studies are generally associated with parti-
cipatory observation, this study has required a ‘participatory experience’ encouraging the
involvement of the experience itself. From this point of view, this research has been
designed as an auto-ethnographic research focusing on the experience. According to
Maréchal (2010), auto-ethnography is a self-observational approach to ethnography. It is
a research method and a writing form that depends on observation and self-observation;
thus, experience. During an auto-ethnographic research, one can use his or her personal
experience to describe and criticize cultural beliefs, practices and experiences because,
social life is scattered, ambiguous and emotional (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2014).
Our specific journey that is subject to research ended in Erzurum after passing through
45 stations including a couple of big cities. In fact, the Eastern Express railway ends in Kars,
however, Erzurum has been a final destination for many backpackers. Their preferences
6 G. SERHAT AND B. UZUNCAN

may vary between Erzurum and Kars depending on their motivations such as accommo-
dation, travel budget, etc. If the train is not delayed, it stops for 3–5 min in village and town
stations, and for 10–12 min in district and city stations.
During this journey, dialogues were entered into with about 30 people (including pri-
marily tourists who are ‘making the Orient Express’, along with ordinary passengers such
as students, peasants, artisans, tradesmen, and local people – residents of the visited
cities). The dialogues were randomly held in various parts of the train and the city (e.g. res-
taurant, different wagons, corridors and stores) and were established improvised and
spontaneous as the requirements of an auto-ethnographic research. Not only what they
said but also what their attitudes and behaviours were noted in addition to a diary of
journey based on our specific travel experience and observations.
We shaped the analytical framework of our study around two backbones. In order to
form the first axis, we focused on the journey, which is the carrier of the desire of spatio-
temporal distancing as the first step of existential divergence search. In this first stage,
experiencing has just begun and the passengers’ desire, excitement, and dreams are
brand new. As a result, the place where the journey motivation appears and is observed
is the train. The second axis is the stage of experience where the journey begins to mani-
fest. The experience stage, which encompasses the activities expressed to realize the
encounters, interactions and expectations on the train, plays an important role in the
examination of the problem of achieving authenticity. In this phase, passengers have to
embrace the possible experiences which can be presented by the new environment
and penetrate local way of life and its culture. Only with this, one can make the spatiotem-
poral distancing meaningful and nurture his or her passion for existential divergence. By
examining these two axis together, we try to find out how and in which degree expec-
tations of the passengers combine with authentic experiences throughout the encounters
and interactions in the localities.

Onto the train: spatiotemporal distancing

A twenty-hour-journey on the Eastern Express line from Ankara to Erzurum may be
described as both being everywhere and being nowhere at the same time. You are every-
where because the space outside, like flowing time, flows with the sense of being in a
different geography in every moment. This flow facilitates existential divergence. Rhyth-
mic sounds repeat as if they echo forever. The journey is one day and spending a full
night and a full day on the train brings the dilemma of whether it is a journey or an accom-
modation. There is no exact address all day during the journey, so you are nowhere. This
may be interpreted as a feeling that encourages you to take pyjamas, slippers and lots of
food and drink. But beyond that, we saw that most of the Eastern Express passengers
designed their rooms with the objects they brought from their homes and they tried to
turn the wagons into their nests. Being everywhere was actually being nowhere.
According to Kruger and Saayman (2010), what motivates people to travel to places
that are not exactly the centres of attraction, such as Erzurum and Kars are desire of dis-
covery, participation in local activities, nostalgia, innovation, escape and relaxation. For Rid
et al. (2014), the motivations may be based on cultural heritage and nature (picturesque
nature, history, traditions and culture, rural areas), authentic rural experience (spending
time with local people, feeling strong experience, local dishes, local lifestyle), learning
 JOURNAL OF TOURISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE 7

(local people’s language, traditional dances, associates with myths and stories, local handi-
crafts) and the 3S’ (sea-sand-sun in coastal areas).
The main motivation of our wagon neighbours H. E. (73) and N. E. (65) is to travel into
the depths of Anatolia. This couple, whose financial situation is quite good and who have
visited many places both at home and abroad, states that they were setting off on their
journey to the Eastern Express adventure after being influenced by Great Continental
Railway Journey, a documentary on Bloomberg TV. After retirement, they now feel freer
to move about. ‘It is time to travel!’ they said, while classical music was playing in the back-
ground. Their travels also had a nostalgic dimension. For them, the train was the main
mean of transportation. Although they were well-off, travelling by train was a search for
nostalgia. The fact that the railroads were ascribed as a sign of the Westernization and
modernization process in the first years of the Republic may have motivated this
couple, who have internalized Western life-style and who may be called ‘old’, to go on
the Eastern Express journey. For example, H. E. (73) mentions the sleeping and dining
wagons of the Paris – Istanbul Orient Express operated by a French company called
Vagon-Li (Wagon-Lits) until 1972. According to what they say, French cuisine was
served during those times. This journey, on the one hand nurtures the desire to travel
to nature, to the unknown, to the authentic; on the other hand, it takes them back to
their youth and to the endeavour of westernization in times that they witnessed.
The dining car of the train may be defined as a socialization centre. Travellers, back-
packers in particular, meet here and have long chats. A Swiss, S. L. (33) is literally an
example for backpackers. Although he is completely European in terms of his way of think-
ing, he says that he has always been curious about the Eastern world. He has a backpack
and two Turkish friends with him. The Eastern Express is just a piece of his journey, he also
plans to go to Iran and Pakistan after finishing his travel in Turkey. He adds that in these
countries, he does not have any prediction or planning of what to do, where to visit and
what to see. The factors that attract him are uncertainty, danger, adventure, romance and
the authenticity of the East.
O. B. (31) took to the road with three of his friends. He says that they want to be on the
road, because they have grown weary of struggling with the daily uproar in Istanbul. They
plan to visit the Ani Ruins and eat goose meat in Kars which it is famous for. He also men-
tions a novel (Orhan Pamuk’s Kar – Snow, 2002) in which the story takes place in Kars. He
says that they would stay in an affordable hotel and that they brought their own food and
drinks with them. They have pyjamas on and look quite relaxed. Apparently, they have suc-
ceeded in escaping the distracting atmosphere of Istanbul and their busy work schedules.
On the other hand, we have encountered regular passengers on the train and had con-
versations with them too. We observed that they were mostly happy with tourists and
backpackers visiting Erzurum. They claim that tourists and backpackers have brought a
kind of dynamism to the city. For example, K.O. (29), who is a small town local, explains
that the Kemah District Governor meets the passengers of the Eastern Express train in
company with a drum and zurna concert. He expresses that he expects the tourists to
stay in his hometown too. He believes that this may give Kemah a high economic
return and give a magic touch to the district. These expressions may be an indication
that the local people have begun to think about the train journey in a different way
and it could be interesting to see that the train is being reinterpreted as economic
8 G. SERHAT AND B. UZUNCAN

concerns, demands and symbols. In this perspective, we can argue that trains are gaining
more importance in the eyes of the locals through economic concerns and demands.
In terms of travel experience, two different loci of emotion on the train come into col-
lision. It may be said that this creates distinctly contrast pictures which belong to two
different worlds. The locals, who need to use the train for their routines, seem to be
tired of these journeys; for travellers who have taken a break from their daily routine,
however, this journey creates an extraordinary, joyful and promising circle for excitement.
In respect to this, it is possible to say that the desire for existential divergence is tried to be
saturated through emotions such as adventure quest, nostalgia, integration with nature
and discovery.

Into the city: chasing authenticity

Erzurum, with a population of 425 thousand in the city centre, is one of the largest Turkish
cities in Eastern Anatolia. Before arriving Kars, Erzurum is the last major city which the
Eastern Express passes through. Our train was delayed for two hours and our journey
ended at 16.30 at Erzurum Train Station. When we got off the train, the first thing that
caught our attention was the semaver (a metal urn with a spigot to steep tea) which
had been set up on a table next to the platform. In Erzurum, where tea has a great cultural
importance, samovar and kıtlama tea sugar (a way of drinking tea by keeping some kind of
special sugar in the mouth) are sometimes offered for free and sometimes sold to people
in restaurants and cafes. On the one hand, it is a sign of hospitality, on the other, it may be
considered as cultural marketing which gives visitors an authentic experience. Backpack-
ers, who are going to Kars, receive their cağ kebabs (a horizontally stacked marinated rotat-
ing meat peculiar to the Oltu region of Erzurum), which they had ordered before they
arrived in Erzurum, in this 10–15-minute break. This may be interpreted as one of the
symptoms of the authentic experience search. A Korean couple who ordered two cag
kebabs was an interesting example. With a simple online search, we learned that people
are recommended via Instagram or other blogs to order and eat cag kebab as a must-
do thing in Erzurum. It has already become a kind of ritual for the travellers who come
or take a break in Erzurum.
We also observed that many backpackers would prefer accommodation with an afford-
able budget. Some say that they are going to be staying in Kars Teachers’ House, a public
facility, which provides a cheap but good service. We have also heard that while some
backpackers camp in tents, some of them stay with their friends who were studying in
Erzurum and Kars. On the other hand, the ski resort of Palandöken is quite popular in
the winter season and most 4–5-star hotels are built on the slopes of the mountain, but
not in the city centre. However, Eastern Express backpackers are generally not among
the customers of these hotels.
As we left the train station and headed towards the hotel, a middle-aged oltu (a black
amber stone) rosary seller approached us. He was counting his personal rosary beads, and
trying to sell us one his rosaries. We did not buy a rosary, but he helped us find the hotel.
Within only 15 min, we saw cag kebab, samovar and oltu rosaries, which are three of the
symbols of the authentic narrative of Erzurum. As Wang and Pfister (2008) emphasize,
trains like the Eastern Express, which carry new travellers to lesser known places, have
already started to contribute to the economic and socio-cultural development of localities.
 JOURNAL OF TOURISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE 9

Especially at the first glance, it is felt that new employment opportunities have been
created through the commercial activities with the sales of local products.
We went out the same evening we arrived in the city. The streets of downtown Erzurum
we walked randomly through did not reflect a modern city atmosphere. We wandered ran-
domly just like an ordinary backpacker. Some historical buildings, small trades shops and
restaurants appeared on our way. A shop owner directed us to the Rüstem Paşa Kervansar-
ayı (Rustem Pasha Caravanserai) which is known as Taş Han. This 500-year-old building, a
historical resting place for travellers, serves as the production and sales location for oltu
stone shopkeepers. They produce and sell dozens of gift items including rosaries, rings
and necklaces. Then, we went into a spice store that was full of local products. We
bought local spices from here. At the bazaar, we realized that we were not being subjected
to the stand-offish attitudes of shopkeepers that are at times typical of small Anatolian
cities. This situation may show that the local people are ready to welcome tourists and
at the same time consider them as income channels. Of course, it is undeniable that tra-
ditional Anatolian hospitality has a significant share, maybe as part of the brand value of
marketable locality.
Nevertheless, considering that they are not making an intense effort to sell products,
yet, it is worth to mention that a reasonable communicational gap is still maintained
between local sellers and backpackers/tourists. Tradesmen do not complain about the
young visitors coming via the Eastern Express. Even if they bring some problems, they
may be tolerated considering their positive effect on the local economy. Doxey (1975,
pp. 195–198) discusses this situation in the context of tolerance approach and underlines
the phase of happiness in which the local population is satisfied with the development of
tourism. The level of happiness is strictly related with the behaviours of the new comers
who penetrate an ‘untouched’ city. They are welcomed according to how much they
respect the local people’s norms and values, and avoid changing the city’s authentic
pattern. The phase of happiness may finish with the increase of tourist numbers and of
tourism-based physical and social problems.
Historical Erzurum Houses and Paşa Bey Mansion are mentioned as a must to visit by the
shopkeepers in the bazaar. Therefore, we decided to see these places as the next desti-
nations of our random wandering in the city. The visits gave a significant insight in
terms of the authentic experiencing processes. The 300-year-old historical Erzurum
Houses serve as a restaurant and have more than 20 thousand antique household
goods. Those who want only to visit these houses are charged three Turkish liras. In the
menus of the restaurant, houses are defined as an ethnography museum where local
dishes are served, and also are promoted in travel magazines as an ‘authentic place’
(Kara, 2018).
The most significant characteristic of the place is that the historical sites, which were
actually independent of each other, have been merged into a restaurant according to
the authentic service culture of the city. Its rooms have been decorated with almost 20
thousand used tools which were collected from the province, especially the city’s rural
environment. While some have consciously been placed, some others have been ran-
domly left around. The concept of ‘staged authenticity’ (MacCannell, 1999) may provide
a proper insight to describe what kind of scenario has been built for this place. When
we sat around a traditional round floor table, we received the recommendations of the
waiter regarding some local soups: ‘You can find the buttermilk soup in other cities, so
10 G. SERHAT AND B. UZUNCAN

please try Erzurum’s home-made fettuccini’. They are probably aware of what people
search for here: Authentic experience. It reminded us who we are as ‘domestic tourists’
and what we should prefer as tourists who are searching for authenticity. In other
words, we have been canalized, or maybe encouraged to play our roles in the scenario
written around the so-called service culture peculiar to the place. Moreover, as part of
the stage prop, the floor table was just next to the kitchen, which resembles a large
fireplace. This positioning shows that there is a certain commercial strategy to make
people feel themselves in a specific authentic ambiance, because unlike here, the tables
are normally located in another part of the typical one-room traditional houses.
According to Hjalager and Corigliano (2000), there is a direct positive relationship
between food-drink and the image of destination. In Turkey, each city is famous for its
original cuisine culture. In addition to cag kebab, Erzurum is also famous for its Turkish
home-made fettuccini. However, such places are appealing throughout the authenticity
of the place rather than the originality of local tastes presented in the place. On the
other hand, the area where the inn is located stands out with its width. This part is not
equipped with floor tables, but dining tables. Those who want to experience only the
local tastes, rather than the place itself, may have their breakfast, lunch or dinner at
tables, but those who prefer the floor table strongly experience a staged authenticity
and leave their modern habits to reinforce the temporal, spatial and behavioural existen-
tial divergence.
Paşa Bey Mansion is located right next to the Üç Kümbetler (The Three Tombs) which is
one of the best examples of the monumental tombs from twelfth and fourteenth century
Anatolia. Hakem A. (55) and his family reside in the mansion which has a history of about
three hundred years. When we asked him ‘Is this a museum?’, his answer was ‘Kind of!
Let me show you around’. The greatest heir of the family, Hakem, took us to the
kitchen first. In the kitchen, his presentation style on Erzurum cuisine culture was very
similar to the attitude and behaviour of a tourist guide. Then we went up the stairs to
see the Selamlık room where male guests were welcomed in traditional Muslim house-
holds. Here, the Mansion’s owner specifically pointed up to the woodwork on the
ceiling. Afterwards, he took one of our mobile phones and left it on the table that is
located right under the special woodwork on the ceiling, as if he was managing a work-
shop on how to take beautiful selfies with these embroideries. By doing that, he turned
our experience into a small performance. More importantly, he recorded this mise-en-
scene exactly as he wanted it to be. In this way, selfies turned into a reproduction of
a suitable dramaturgy for that scene, while it was detached from its use value as
memory carrier and documentation.
Another room located right next to the Selamlık is called the Haremlik. It is a private
room designated only for the household of the mansion and female guests. This place
is forbidden for men who are not a part of family. Our ‘guide’ kept telling us the mansion’s
story. As a memorized dialogue that had probably taken shape in time, he must have
repeated this show-like guidance for each guest since the first visitor came. In a specific
moment of the tour, he left the room and brought us tea and sugar from the kitchen.
In this point he demonstrated to us how to drink black tea traditionally with a lump of
sugar in the mouth, which is called kıtlama in Erzurum and other close eastern cities. In
this demonstration, it had no importance whether guests love tea, use sugar or not.
This could be seen as a usual part of the spectacle since Turkey is home to the world’s
 JOURNAL OF TOURISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE 11

biggest tea drinkers (Ferdman, 2014). Especially in some cities such as Erzurum, drinking
tea is an irreplaceable ritual of daily life. Beyond it is nutritious value, tea is a sign of
peace, conversation, hospitality, close relations, etc. Throughout such a ritualistic drinking
experience loaded with symbolic meanings, we found the opportunity to browse lots of
modern and antique goods in the room with the tea glasses in our hands.
Although Mr. Hakem’s intention was apparently to turn the mansion into an ethno-
graphic museum, the place we visited seemed more like an antique shop. We may
think of it as the random staging of authenticity. Not to say that a natural involvement
or interaction could be experienced in this place, which usually makes a visit to be
described as authentic. Notably, a piece of paper written ‘Voluntary Donation – 10 TL
per person’ is attached to the wall right next to the door, where it can easily be seen
before leaving the place after the tour. This paper sends us off with a kind of donation
request, but also creates a confusion accompanied by a certain ambivalence as to
whether it is a necessity or not. In this sense, we can argue that while it was an appealing
call for an authentic experience at the beginning, it might end as a paid touristic visit. This
tour, which initially gives the impression of an authentic experience at first has also the
potential to lose authenticity all of a sudden. Such that, one can complete his or her per-
formance by following unawares a pre-designed route, and pay a certain fee after doing
what is needed to do.
At the end of the day (after an idle walk among most known historical places of the
city), we started looking for cag kebab restaurants. Before coming to the city, we searched
for the best cag kebab in Erzurum like ordinary backpackers do. However, when we asked
Erzurumians to suggest to us a good restaurant, it did not match with what we already
knew. They mentioned that the popular restaurants had been misleadingly advertised,
so they suggested us some other ‘unfamed’ places for a genuine cag kebab to eat. We
chose one of them by following the advice of locals. There was no menu in this restaurant.
The waiters were quite polite and continued to bring kebab to the table until we asked
them to stop bringing more. When we wanted to take a picture of the restaurant’s ocakbaşı
(special grill), the staff immediately figured out that we were not from Erzurum, and made
up a quick mise en scene for us. A waiter gave one of us a kebab knife and took a picture as
we are cutting the kebab. Actually, while we were in pursuit of authentic flavours we found
what we were looking for, but our presence and behaviours revealed our unfamiliarity to
the place’s cultural codes and thus our experience was transformed into a predetermined
local – tourist relationship. What we experienced there, though not in the context of food,
was turned into an experience of staged authenticity.

Concluding notes and a brief discussion on impossibility of authentic

experience
The horizon of the travel routes is limited to the time and space as well as the variety of
experiences it promises. Since the Eastern Express is inherently dependent on a certain
navigation and is subject to the space constraint of the train itself, it is not easy to say
that this trip fits the classical definition of the backpackers’ travel experience. This two-
day travel may reduce the travellers who are looking for different experiences into cap-
tured tourists, without even realising it. Once in the Kemah district of Erzincan, for
example, Kemahians turned the station platform into a kind of stage when the train
12 G. SERHAT AND B. UZUNCAN

stopped. They offered an authentic experience to the travellers who have no choice but to
be subjected to the show they perform during the break:
The passengers of the Eastern Express were met with a drum – zurna (a traditional wind instru-
ment) ceremony in our district. Local products were served to passengers. It was organized by
the District Governorship and Kemah Municipality. Passengers, who were welcomed with a
drum-zurna surprise, enjoyed filming the ceremony with their mobile phones. Gift packages,
which contain local cheese in flat bread, Kemah salt and some advertisement brochure, were
delivered to the passengers by Governor Ahmet Karaaslan and Mayor Osman Kemal Aslan. The
passengers were surprised and said they were welcomed very nicely. (T.R. Kemah District Gov-
ernorship Web Site, 2018)

We may consider this organization as an example of hospitality and cultural promotion. At

the same time, this can be described as a persuasion process addressed to the passengers
to motivate them to come to Kemah and to consume the authenticity of the region by
spending time and money in the town. Thus, it may revitalize the tourism potential of
the city and contribute to the local economy. As is seen in many examples, instead of
being genuine, real, original, essential, untouched or unaffected, authentic experience
has been attached to the travel experience in a pre-designed, unnatural, organised and
show-like manner. Therefore, it seems inevitable that the search for existential divergence
and authentic experience, in a world where people face the threat of categorization and
industrialization of every kind of human expectations, may turn into a product of the
experience economy (Pine & Gillmore, 2019).
The encounters, interviews and observations we experienced on the Eastern Express
journey in order to fictionalize this research show that the fundamental motivation for
those that travel the Eastern Express is either the desire to escape the life that existential
anxiety triggers or the search for happiness. Transcending the choking limits of routine life
and giving more meaning to life by seeking new, different and alluring experiences is what
forms their basic urge. The limited opportunities of the journey undertaken in order to
realize the existential separation makes the consequences of completely severing ties
with the life left behind and of searching for an authentic experience controversial. We
can solve the inability of the journey to evolve into an existential divergence through inte-
gration with an authentic experience by referring to two situations. One of these is exis-
tential divergence’s necessary yet insufficient condition, which is temporal and spatial
distancing. The fundamental issue here is the fact that geographical distancing in
today’s global conditions has been exposed to a dramatical semantic shift. The develop-
ments in transportation especially have made it almost impossible for geography to
remain a mystery and has caused an end to the perception of distance to remote
places. This also leads to a temporal alignment. It is as if different geographies have con-
verged on a specific point in the history. Another situation that feeds this shift in meaning
is the intense and widespread use of social media due to the developments in technology.
For those who practice everyday life mostly online, it is almost impossible to experience
distancing. Even if the life left behind and the social relationships surrounding that life
get further and further away spatially and temporally, it is constantly close and daily in
the online world.
The second matter is existential divergence’s indispensable condition: experiential
differentiation and transformation/alteration. The main issue here is how difficult it is
for the obscurity, surprise encounters, and the experiences that make existential
 JOURNAL OF TOURISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE 13

distancing real and meaningful to happen. The most important reason for this is the public
discourse about this specific journey that has been produced over the last few years. This
narrative is created through online content carriers like vlogs/blogs and Instagram and
form representations of the journey that take root under certain headings. The situation
we blatantly identified in our study was the fact that the distancing that had been con-
sidered to be an experience towards the unknown was imprisoned within certain rep-
resentations. The passengers really do experience the excitement of going towards
places they did not know and had not seen, however, in essence, this adventure can
not go beyond reproducing the representations shaped via the channels we mentioned
above. The things we refer to as the unknown, are actually things that are known but
have never been encountered or experienced yet. Thus, the search for the unknown
only consists of the desire to encounter things that were designed in the past as the
unknown. Therefore, the excitement of going towards obscurity that we often heard on
the train was not about experiencing it but about consuming it or possessing it.
The backpackers or drifters on Eastern Express trains looked like adventurous travellers
who were attracted to an unusual travel experience and to separating themselves from
regular mass tourists. With the excitement of going on a nostalgic journey into an auth-
entic world, they have covered plenty of kilometres by collecting memories of an extra-
ordinary traveling experience. However, knowingly or unknowingly, instead of crowning
their experience with spontaneity and discovery, they were essentially fulfilling a to-do-
list. They might have not had enough foreknowledge to take measure of the danger of
being a captured tourist during this journey including the train, stations and the cities
as well. But still, almost every passenger on the train was happy for escaping from some-
thing that they had left behind, and were not worried that they might be exposed to the
danger of transforming into ordinary tourists. Thus, it could be stated that the journey
allows for the experiences that passengers spread over social media through images
and symbols to be reproduced, for travellers to play the pre-prepared roles recommended
in authentic performances and for them to not be able to naturally embrace the cultural
lives of the places visited. In this respect the following could also be claimed; even if the
desire to escape is an existential state – a humane search, it may still transform into an
experience monopolized by widespread touristic stereotypes and economic mindsets.
Authentic experience itself spreads as a performance and may commodify our search
by limiting the existential to roles. Thus, an obvious misconception is revealed: You
believe you are going to have an experience; however, the experience is coming to
have you.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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