Selfies made in "City of Dead" raise issues of enhancing awareness of tourists

The responsibility for the selfie with a skull made in the Dargavs Necropolis rests both on the tourist and on the bosses of the National Museum of North Ossetia, who should pay more attention to educating tourists, the experts interviewed by the "Caucasian Knot" are confident.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on July 29, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) for North Ossetia informed that an 18-year-old resident of Pyatigorsk became a suspect in a case of desecration of bodies of the dead and places of their burial in the "City of Dead" Complex. According to the MIA, the tourist took out the skulls of the deceased, put them onto the window unit of the crypt, made photos with them on a mobile phone and posted them on his page in a social network.

The tourist should be punished for desecrating bodies of the dead in the Dargavs Necropolis, Alina Akoeva, a public figure and an art historian, is sure.

However, she notes that the incident with the tourist became possible due to flaws in the work of the museum's bosses.

Alikhan Khoranov, the editor of the Ossetian portal "Hohag.com", also agrees with the opinion that a tourist who made his photos with a skull should be responsible for his actions according to the law. At the same time, in his opinion, the museum's managers could install surveillance cameras and increase security measures.

Galina Tebieva, the director of the North-Caucasian Branch of the National Centre of Contemporary Arts, does not exclude that such incidents had happened before, but were not broadly publicized.

"For the first time, I saw such an attitude of a tourist to the remains of those buried in Dargavs. But I admit that tourists could undertake such things before. This is the issue of organizing the museum work. If tourists had been told where they were going, what kind of place, what the norms of behaviour in such places are, such incidents would have never happened," Galina Tebieva told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on July 31, 2019 at 06:30 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.