Via Egnatia Foundation

The Via Egnatia Foundation promotes cross border cooperation and contacts in the region of the Via Egnatia in the fields of culture, science, sustainable tourism and (peace) education.


 

Contribute

You can help the VEF to achieve its goals in various ways.
Donations for the VEF and several projects it undertakes are welcome. But you can also help our cause by walking on Via Egnatia, join the band, etc. Read more...

Via Egnatia on Foot, Part 1

Durrës - Thessaloniki

OmslagVEonFoot

3rd edition November 2021

Read more - Directly to book order

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: Unfortunately at this moment Part 1 can not be ordered from us. We are out of stock. We work very hard to get new copies printed. This may take upto a month or more.

Meanwhile you can try these bookshops (click on link and search for Egnatia):

- Pied a Terre, Amsterdam, Netherlands

- De Zwerver, Groningen, Netherlands

- Alta Via, Antwerp, Belgium

- Freytag & Berndt, Vienna, Austria

Via Egnatia on Foot, Part 2

From Thessaloniki into Turkey

cover1st edition September 2022 - now available

Read more - Directly to book order

A road is a way of transferring and connecting people, tradesware, art and ideas

The Via Egnatia has been such a road par excellence, being the connection between the western and eastern part of the Roman Empire. Built in the 3rd century BC (under consul Egnatius) as an extension of the Via Appia, it runs through the Balkans from Durrës (Dyrrachium) in Albania, through Northern Macedonia and Northern Greece all the way to Istanbul (Byzantium) in Turkey.
Originally a military road, it served economic and social functions for more than two millenia. After the decline of the Roman Empire the Byzantines used and protected the road. After them came the Ottomans, who send their taxcollectors and trade-karavans along its trail.

Used by soldiers and later by crusaders, preachers and bandits, merchants and peasants on their way to the local market, tax collectors, karavans with up to twohundred mules and donkeys, loaded with skins, wines, wood and sulphur, the road served local as well as interlocal purposes. Many different ethnic groups made use of the Via Egnatia, and met each other along its trails, in its karavan-serails: Greeks and Jews, Vlachs and Pomaks, Turks, Venetians, Egyptians and Roma. Also modern migrants travelled long it, for example the Evros-Greeks who left their country in the sixties and (many of them) came back in the last decade. So the Via Egnatia - with intervals due to political or geografical trouble - has been a real trans-Balkan highway.

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