How historification shapes hospitality: insights from Greece and implications for Finland

Since 2022, LE MONDE Institute of Hotel and Tourism Studies, in collaboration with Haaga-Helia, has offered a bachelor’s degree in hospitality management. As part of this collaboration, we teach at LE MONDE in Athens twice a year. What began as a teaching assignment evolved into a broader inquiry into how history and culture inform hospitality across different contexts: private, social and commercial.

In Greece, the concept of philoxenia, originating from the Greek word Φιλοξενία (philoxenia), itself composed of two Greek words, Φίλος (philos, meaning friend) and Ξένος (xenos, meaning alien, outsider or stranger), is defined as an act of hospitableness and welcome (Collins 2025) and is widely regarded as synonymous with hospitality.

Philoxenia is deeply embedded in the Greek national identity and, according to Singleton (2023), it sits deep in Greek culture and mythology, where its layers of culture and religion formed a powerful force for creating peaceful relations at individual, group or societal levels. However, despite this rich heritage, we observed that these historical narratives and customs are not always systematically integrated into hospitality education or practice. The historical depth exists, but its application in pedagogical frameworks or business practices remains somewhat implicit.

The same can be said of Finland which, despite its more understated historical tradition of hospitality, often misses opportunities to apply historical and cultural narratives more deliberately. Finnish hospitality is defined by sincerity and quiet professionalism (Lindell & Sigfrids 2007), values that have the potential to be translated into structured service rituals and curated guest experiences anchored in cultural and historical heritage.

In other words, these and similar values are resources for experience design when translated into deliberate rituals and dramaturgies that draw on cultural memory.

Historification in hospitality

In the context of the experience economy, hospitality work becomes a form of theatre, with every hospitality business functioning as a stage where encounters between hosts and guests are deliberately scripted and performed. Appropriately, the concept of historification is generally credited to the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. In his theory of epic theatre, Brecht introduced the term (from the German Historisierung) to describe the technique of setting a play in another historical time or place in order to make contemporary social relations appear strange, contingent and open to change. In essence, historification is an interpretive and design practice that questions the present through the lens of the past or future as in the use of anticipatory narratives.

For us, historification refers to the process of embedding cultural and historical narratives, oral or written, into contemporary practices in general, and into commercial practices in particular. In other words, historification is the intentional selection, interpretation and staging of cultural-historical materials to script contemporary hospitality encounters in ways that elicit reflection, participation and emotional resonance. It differs from heritage display by foregrounding dramaturgy, guest agency and present-centred critique. In hospitality, historification can transform service from a transactional act into a meaningful experience.

When engaging in historification, we see an opportunity for hospitality and tourism students, professionals and scholars to incorporate historical methods, such as oral histories, biography and prosopography (MacKenzie, Pittaki & Wong 2019), to deepen the understanding of cultural and historical material as the evidentiary grounding of their designs. In addition, when strategically applied, historification can serve as a tool for differentiation, guest participation and emotional engagement. In this way, historification contributes to positioning hospitality as a social performance in which guests become participants in a shared cultural-historical narrative.

In this vein, hospitality is understood as a social performance in which the identities of host and guest are never fixed but continually negotiated through interaction. Nouwen’s (1998) observation that all hosts are at other times guests, and vice versa, foregrounds this reversibility, suggesting that the roles enacted in any given encounter are contingent positions within a broader relational field rather than essential characteristics of individuals. Similarly, O’Gorman’s (2005) reminder that the Greek term xenos simultaneously signifies guest, host and stranger further complicates the scene of hospitality, since the same figure can occupy multiple, even conflicting, roles at once, depending on perspective and moment.

Read together, these insights invite us to conceptualise hospitality as a dramaturgy in which participants continuously shift between welcoming and being welcomed, recognising and being recognised, incorporating and being incorporated. The social performance of hospitality, therefore, is not merely about offering services or material comfort, but about staging and restaging relationships of familiarity and otherness, intimacy and distance, power and vulnerability, through the fluid exchange of the positions of host, guest and stranger.

Students applying historical narratives

In Greece, as students applied historification in their course project, we observed how readily they drew on Greek culture and historical narratives, such as those related to collective memory, religious traditions and heroic or mythic figures, to create transformative hospitality experiences.

For example, in relation to askēsis (ἄσκησις, meaning exercise or training), one group highlighted the narrative of Milo of Croton and bodily askēsis, focusing on training as disciplined self-transformation. Another group explored the narrative of Diogenes of Sinope as the anti-citizen who undergoes training to free himself from the needs and opinions that constrain others. A third group highlighted the narrative of Abba Antonius (Ἀββᾶς Ἀντώνιος) as a kind of spiritual athlete who withdraws to the desert, battles demons, fasts and keeps vigil, with his entire askēsis framed as training for holiness.

Through historification, students start to recognise that philoxenia (hospitality), as well as askēsis (training), is not an inexhaustible essence that automatically guarantees good service, but a historically produced repertoire of practices, obligations and expectations that can be mobilised in different ways. Here, historification functioned both as a design tool and as a critical lens.

Lessons for Finland

Against the above, our experience in Greece highlighted the potential for Finnish hospitality providers to further leverage national, regional, local and family cultural and historical narratives. While Finland may not have a history as overtly expressive as that of Greece, it boasts a rich array of narratives. These include Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala and Kanteletar, the Sámi tradition of joik, Tove Jansson’s beloved Moomin stories and Finnish folk tales, all of which can be transformed into meaningful guest experiences.

Some of these narratives have already been embraced by Finnish businesses. For example, the story behind Hotel Kalevala in Kuhmo draws inspiration from the Kalevala, and its architecture is based on a tale of an eagle spreading its wings to rise into the sky. Hotel Klaus K introduced its Kalevala-inspired design concept in 2005 when it was transformed into Finland’s first true design hotel. The theme draws heavily on the national epic, incorporating motifs like the creation story (seven eggs), Kalevala characters and emotional contrasts such as passion, mystical, desire and envy in its room categories.

Other examples abound, although less vividly. Kyrö Distillery is housed in its repurposed 1908 dairy building in Isokyrö and organises guided tours. This adaptive reuse of a historic building ties the distillery to the region’s rural and industrial past, preserving a piece of local history while giving it new life. Kyrö also pays homage to the Battle of Napue (1714) with its original gin, Napue, named after this battle. Suomenlinna Sea Fortress organises themed guided tours where guests hear about the fortress’s past and present, and Sauna Stone Lab explores the intersection of material, ritual and design, turning recycled sauna stones into ritual objects.

We see significant potential in applying historification in education and business by creating connections not only with the past but also with the future, while addressing contemporary issues, motives, and themes. For anyone willing to experiment with it, the process of historification can be articulated through the following steps:

• Choose a historical setting: select a specific period or era in the past.
• Highlight social conditions: make visible how life was structured under the particular historical circumstances of that time.
• Use alienation (Verfremdungseffekt): use costumes, props, staging and dialogue to remind guests that the experience is a constructed reality. The aim is to invite critical reflection and analysis rather than simple emotional engagement.
• Draw parallels to the present: although the experience is set in the past or future, its issues, motives and themes should echo contemporary challenges. In doing so, guests are prompted to question themselves, their assumptions and the society in which they live.

In conclusion, historification is not romanticising the past. It is treating culture and history as living resources for designing meaningful, place-based experiences that speak to contemporary dilemmas.

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