Sightseeing as a space for intercultural education

The article is an attempt to draw readers’ attention to the potential for broadening the field of interests and activities of theoreticians and practitioners of intercultural education that lies in sightseeing. In particular, it is about this type of activity as undertaken by contemporary Poles with respect to the area of the former Polish Eastern Kresy (i.e. the territory Poland lost in the aftermath of WW2 – fragments of the present Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania). Apart from the reflection on the forms of tourism and the place occupied therein by sightseeing, the article concentrates on its five spheres useful for intercultural education: (1) informal mode of getting acquainted with an ‘Other’, who (2) is not ethnically and culturally too distant, (3) on visiting the given area that (4) may be of an incidental and short term character as well as (5) be concentrated not only on people but also on their cultural products: symbolic and material. The article closes with examples of situations in which ill-conceived sightseeing distorts the idea of intercultural education. After all, even though hypocrisy or biased presentation of a place and its inhabitants, education that reproduces the monocultural face of a given land is possible.