"A Truly Mystical and Enigmatic Place": Methods of Engaging Tourists' Imagination in the Promotion of Trips to Seydozero Lake (Murmansk Region)

The paper analyses advertising tests containing information about trips to Seidozero (Murmansk region) and considers what techniques entrepreneurs use to attract tourists there. At the centre of our reasoning is the category of (social) imagination. Our assumption is that entrepreneurs working in tourism, when offering a product, are guided by general cultural knowledge about places and peoples or, rather, about types of cultures, as well as by the preferences of tourists travelling to places of power and seeking a special experience (spiritual tourists). This knowledge forms variants of images of places and peoples (imageries) or, in other words, patterns of imagination. The results of the study have shown that Seydozero's reputation outside the Murmansk region is based on its fame as a special natural locus, and on the popularity of two etiological narratives related to its historical past - Sámi and Hyperborean. The former is built on the imaginative template of ‘Sacred place of the indigenous people’, the latter uses the image of ‘Centre of ancient civilisation’. In each particular narrative, these templates can complement and reinforce each other's authority, but they can also compete, to the point where in one narrative the second template is presented as secondary, irrelevant and even fictitious. In each particular narrative, these templates may complement and reinforce each other's authority, but they may also compete to the point where in one narrative the second template is presented as secondary, irrelevant and even fictitious. And each produces its own frame for the work of the imagination, which fills that frame with what will be realised and re-presented by the traveller as their particular spiritual experience of being in a place of power.