Festivals are events that enable the transmission of past ties to the future without severing them. Festivals serve as a conduit for cultural exchange between the residents of a region and the local and international visitors who attend the festivals. The primary objective of this study is to investigate the perceptions of Edirne, Turkey locals regarding festival tourism with cultural exchange and cultural balance interaction dimensions, as well as to establish whether the dimensions of cultural interaction differ based on demographic variables. A total of 390 individuals were surveyed to obtain data for the study, and SPSS 22.0 was used to analyze the acquired data. This study reveals that festivals significantly contribute to regional tourism and the local population, as well as to the development of intercultural communication, and that the sub-dimensions of cultural exchange and cultural balance differ depending on the type of events.
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The Turkish Nation, whose history dates back thousands of years, has established the most influential, powerful, and long-lasting states in the history of the world on the lands where it resides, and has wiped out numerous cultures and civilizations, possesses a vast cultural accumulation that has been shaped by the historical accumulation. Festivals serve a crucial part in the transmission of this cultural accumulation from the past to the present. Festivals can be evaluated as events that reinforce the concept of continuity between the past, present, and future and function as a bridge. One of the primary functions of festivals, according to Zhang et al. (2019), is to “permit communal representation, collective celebration, and, in most cases, the collective expression of jointly expressed forms of socio-cultural identity”. In a sense, festivals provide a setting for the formation of the cultural memory of the local populace and for social contact based on the impression of a shared past that they generate. This social interaction setting is conducive to cultural exchange. Ürkmez and Akbulut (2020) note that festivals, which play a significant role in the production of cultural heritage and its transmission to future generations, are areas of intercultural and intercommunal contact with the participation of both locals and international tourists. Gibson et al. (2011) assert that festivals serve as both a venue of enjoyment and identity performance. According to the Festival Experience Prism Model established by Morgan (2008) to investigate how festival participants evaluate their experiences, social connection, and cultural dialogue are crucial to the success of a festival. Social contact can be defined as the exchange of information, emotions, and behaviour between people, individuals-groups, and groups. According to Pamir (1997), the encounter between tourists and natives creates a social and cultural change on both sides.
Due to the fact that culture is a versatile actor for tourism, the literature contains research that explicate the dynamics between tourism and culture from various perspectives. The dimension that distinguishes this study from others is its investigation of the presentation of perceptions associated to cultural interaction with the festival tourism dimension from the perspective of locals, rather than the general effects of all sorts of tourism. The study consists of three sections in this dimension. In the first section, festival tourism and cultural interaction are explored, and in the second, festival tourism supply sources in the province of Edirne are examined. In the final component, an application study was conducted to determine the function that festival tourism plays in cultural interaction. In the concluding section of the study, the outcomes of the performed analyses are discussed.