Explore a Roman highway in Balkans | VIA EGNATIA - Europe’s Oldest & Longest Road

Via Egnatia οne οf Europe’s οldest & longest roads passed through the mountains of ancient Illyria, Macedonia and Thrace to arrive, more than 1,100 kilometers later, in Byzantium, as Constantinople.
If the Via Egnatia was the Roman Empire’s main route east, in use long after the empire fell, it gained new life under the Ottomans-even before their 1453 conquest of Constantinople-who reversed traffic and made it one of their primary corridors west, especially during the Balkan conquests of the late 14th century. As a result, today many mosques, markets, charitable kitchens (imarets), caravansarais (hans) and baths (hammams) along the route date from this time, when in Turkish it was known as Rumeli Sol Kol, literally “Balkan Left Arm.
From the Adriatic coast to Istanbul, the route passes through four modern countries-Albania, Macedonia, Greece and Turkey-and several dozen towns-some in ruins, others still thriving. The road today is considerably less busy than it was in the time of the Roman orator Cicero, who delayed his departure from Thessaloniki for Rome in order to let a multitude of travelers clear from the overcrowded mansios. Yet the quality of its construction and periodic repair is still evident, and lines written by Procopius, chronicler of the reign of the sixth-century ce Byzantine Emperor Justinian, ring true today: “The paving stones are very carefully worked so as to form a smooth and even surface, and they give the appearance not simply of being laid together at the joints, or even of being exactly fitted, but they seem to have actually grown together.
”Firmin O’Sullivan, who traveled the route in 1970 by bicycle and wrote The Egnatian Way, estimated that a Roman soldier could have walked the 700-Roman-mile road in 45 days at a comfortable pace or ridden a horse in half that time; a fast courier could have completed the entire trip, including the sail between Albania and Italy and the Via Appia, in three weeks. By contrast, traveling by sea, all the way around the Peloponnese in southern Greece and up or down the western coast of Italy, would have taken, even in the best of seasons, two to three months.Eastern Macedonia and Western Thrace, Greece
Of the several important archeological sites east of Thessaloniki, none surpass Philippi-in its day a thriving city that witnessed both the beginning of the Roman Empire and the founding of Christianity in Europe. The apostle Paul preached there, was freed from prison by a timely earthquake, addressed its people in his Letter to the Philippians, and moved west on foot to Amphipolis, Apollonia and finally Thessaloniki-all stops on the Via Egnatia.
Before that, the plain outside Philippi had been a battlefield where in the year 42 bce the Roman Republic breathed its last, as witnessed by the defeat of Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar, at the hands of Marc Antony and Octavian. The road was used by the Apostle Paul on his second missionary journey as he traveled from Philippi to Thessalonica (Acts 16-17)
The road thus facilitated the movement both of soldiers, the original intention when Cicero called it a via militaris, and of ideas-an accidental byproduct of Roman road engineering. (When Suleiman the Magnificent marched a 300,000-man army through Macedonia to the Albanian coast for his invasion of Italy in 1537, the road passed what was likely its sternest military test.)
The nearby Greek port of Kavala-called Neapolis in Roman times, and the 1769 birthplace of Muhammad Ali Pasha, founder of the Khedivate in Egypt-today has a still distinctive Ottoman stamp. A 280-meter-long, 24½-meter-high aqueduct, connected to a 6½-kilometer pipeline, was built by Suleiman the Magnificent right through the city center. As a gift to his hometown, Muhammad Ali built a 4,200-square-meter imaret, or charitable kitchen, and a school with four courtyards that is now a luxury hotel.
Muhammad Ali’s family home in Kavala, at the high point of the Panagia promontory with east to west water views and dating from the 1770s, was built in the classic Ottoman style with timber-supported overhanging balconies. His equestrian statue stands in the nearby plaza, depicting him turbaned and sheathing a scimitar. The tomb of his mother, Zeinab, rests nearby.

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