What makes up the heritage identities of a place? How are they recognised and what is more important – how to interpret them and include them in what a destination has to offer to locals and visitors? Together with them we answered these questions back in 2006 in a strategic study of the development of cultural tourism in the City of Ogulin, one of our first projects.
Starting with the cultural potential of the fairy-tale world of the celebrated Ogulin born writer Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, we branded the town as the homeland of fairy tales and offered three cultural products: the Ogulin Fairy Tale Festival, Ivana’s House of Fairy Tales and the Fairy Tale Route. The awards which they have so far received are confirmation of their local, national and European value.
Strategic study
Within the ‘Implementation 21’ programme of the development of cultural tourism in the Karlovac County region, we created a master strategic study for the sustainable development of cultural tourism in Ogulin. The legacy of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić’s fairy tales stood out as the strongest potential for communicating the identity of the town. Together with local people we recognised the fairy tales of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić as a cultural phenomenon which had surpassed the local significance and that it already possessed a strong national, European and even global dimension.
In the making of the study we also adopted and methodologically systematically developed a vision of sustainable development of the cultural tourism destination. We detected the target groups, stakeholders, and analysed the successful fairy tale destination and projects elsewhere. In the end, we all together conceived the brand of the destination under the title Ogulin, the Homeland of Fairy Tales and created the new key cultural tourism products: festival, visitor’s centre and the thematic route. As the main tool of implementing the strategic plan we set and developed an action plan over a period of 15 years.
Ogulin Fairy Tale Festival (OGFB)
The first edition of OGFB was already in 2006. At the time, the strategic study was still “hot.” In a short time, the festival made Ogulin a metropolis of a literary genre that evolved from the stories that grandmothers used to lull their grandchildren to sleep with into literary, film, animated and multimedia forms in which imagination creates a better world.
In the festival editions we produced (2006-2009), OGFB was not only a place of storytelling and the coming together of artists and the public but also a centre where ideas were born, and experts pondered the metamorphosis of fairy tales. Ogulin’s celebration of fairy tales was for us unthinkable without the local foundations, as well as all the extensive networking on the European and international level. For us it was not just a successful cultural-tourism product. From the very beginning our focus was always to contribute to the strengthening of the cultural competences and skills of the local members of the OGFB in order to continue to lead the festival, which is primarily designed from and for them.
Fairy Tale Route
For the fairy tale route, we have created an interpretation plan that brings a complete concept and conceptual solution of this, in its time, unique thematic route in Croatia. Together with local poeple we coordinated and produced content for twelve interpretive signs. Cultural and natural heritage of Ogulin is interpreted through the optics of characters from Ivana’s fairy tales.
The conceptual and visual identity of the Homeland of Fairy Tales and its thematic route was awarded the prestigious RED DOT award in 2008.
Client
Karlovac county tourist board
Tourist board of the City of Ogulin
Author of the study and of the interpretive plan
Dragana Lucija Ratković Aydemir
Author of the visual identity
Vanja Cuculić, Studio Cuculić Zagreb
Illustrator
Srđana Modrinić aka Booboo Tannenbaum
Executive festival director
Ankica Puškarić (2006. – 2014)
Artistic festival directors
Željko Zorica (2006 – 2008)
Mario Kovač (2009 – 2016)
Producer
Karla Bačić Jelinčić, Muze (2006 – 2009)
Photo
Domagoj Blažević
