'The sea connects; It does not divide': Czech tourism on the interwar Adriatic

Through examining Czechoslovak and Yugoslav engagements with the Adriatic Sea from the 1910s to the early 1930s, this article reveals how tourism in the Adriatic region became a productive impetus for new sensory experiences, as well as artistic, political, and commercial experiments. Using Czech travel accounts and guidebooks; Yugoslav tourist advertisements and newspapers; contemporary tourist journals; tourism iconography; and Yugoslav, Czechoslovak, and French archival sources, I explain how tourism intersected with new leisure values, questions of mobility, and ideological and political agendas. Finally, I ask whether or not these aspects informed tourist practices and understandings of the Adriatic region. Although a contemporary tourist promoter's assertion that the sea connects; it does not divide generally encapsulates the horizon of experiences (sensory and otherwise) that Adriatic tourism offered, I argue that tourism was also frequently leveraged for other motives, and thus embodied dynamic paradoxes.