Application of a Cultural Route Evaluation Model (CREM) for Cultural Tourism in Case of Karaman

Abstract

Tourism emerges as a popular and significant industry that affects various sectors. In today's world, innovation has led to qualitative changes in tourism, with a growing emphasis on culture-focused tourism. Cultural based visits prioritize the built environment, making cultural resources, as components of the environment, closely related to tourism (Lasansky & McLaren, 2004). In the last decades, culture-based toursim routes has become very popular since they offer important opportunities for demonstrating new places, promote the city’s brand value with new products and experiences. In this context especially developing countries with rich valuable and cultural heritage have more advantege for showing their potentials. The Council of Europe created and organised the first and the most popular types of cultural routes and defined the trends of cultural tourism development. A considerable progress have been reached in the las years in small and medium scale. Beside cultural routes encourage the local communities, they also promote the awareness of cultural heritage, create important sources for local economy by promoting cultural heritage. According to the ICOMOS Charter on Cultural routes (2005): “The consideration of cultural trails as a newconcept or category does not conflict nor overlap with other categories or types of cultural properties– monuments, cities, cultural landscapes, industrial heritage, etc., that may exist within the orbit of a given cultural corridor. It simply includes them within a joint system which enhances their significance” (ICOMOS Charter on Cultural Routes, 2005). Research indicates that cultural route evaluation has become a popular topic in recent years, leading stakeholders to develop various heritage assessment models that are continually updated and improved over time. Cultural routes, as a response to these endeavors, bring together multiple destinations under a common theme, contributing to regional development and serve as means to understand heritage values (Taşkan et al, 2020). This study focuses on the city of Karaman in Anatolia, which has a multi layered cultural structure and has been home to multiple civilizations, making it a potential destination for cultural tourism. The aim of the study is to integrate the city's heritage sites into tourism routes to promote its development and achieve the recognition it deserves, thus creating a vision for its future. For this aim, a Cultural Route Evaluation Model (CREM) is applied for improving cultural tourism in Karaman. In the first step, a cultural route including important cultural heritage structures and areas was designed and proposed. Then main indicators and sub-indicators were determined for CREM Model. These indicators were asked to ten experts in order to determine the potential of the proposed cultural route. At the end of evaluation main values and tourism specific values are calculated of the proposed route. Regarding to these values, some suggestions were made for teh future of Karaman cultural tourism development.