Situation Report about the State of Affairs in Relation to Image-construction in Gyimes

Gyimes is a particular Middle-European small world on its own. The municipality had some features (e. g. the sustaining archaic cultivating methods until the 1990s, and the beautiful countriside), which were in concordance with the needs of various groups of tourists arriving mainly from Hungary. This is the background for the explosion of tourism and touristic services in Gyimes in the last two decades, and it is also the basis of constructing the image of Gyimes. The paper aims to inquire whether the image of Gyimes constructed by local tourism marketing and the practices of everyday life converge or contradict each other. An interpretational anthropology is able to grasp the tensions between the surface of touristic services off ers and an ambivalent relation to the providers’ own cultural heritage.