Tourist motives for visiting Vitovnica monastery

Abstract

The Monastery Vitovnica is an Orthodox monastery founded in 1291, when King Stefan Uroš III Milutin defeated the Bulgarian enemies who ruled Braničevo from the town of Ždrelo in Gornjačka gorge. Today the monastery is a cultural and historical monument of great importance for the Braničevo district and Serbia. The research included a survey of tourists about the motive of visiting Vitovnica monastery. The respondents rated the offered motifs on the scale from 1 to 5. The objective of the paper is to assess the most common motives and to examine the attitudes of tourists, local residents and tourist workers regarding the cultural offer of the monastery. The motives of tradition and customs were shown to be the highest grade, while the lowest grade assessed scientific educational motives. The results of the SWOT analysis showed that the monastery possesses exceptional tourist potentials when it comes to its natural environment and an anthropogenic basis for the development of tourism. An empirical survey conducted on a sample of 85 respondents aimed to show the specific views and motives of tourists when visiting the monastery. The data obtained in the research were processed using the statistical program SPSS (version 17.0).

Keywords

• tourist motives
• religious tourism
• cultural tourism
• vitovnica monastery