Balkans History Tour: A Route Through Crossroads, Empires and Landscapes

The Balkans pack a remarkable number of historical layers into a short journey. Within a few days’ travel of the Adriatic you can stand in a Roman emperor’s palace, a fortified medieval monastery, an Ottoman bazaar, a Habsburg-era fortress and a memorial to the Second World War, within a few days of each other. A Balkans history tour makes sense of that density by following a single line across the map, and that is what our 19-day small group tour from Dubrovnik to Kotor does, crossing Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, North Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro. This guide walks through that route day by day, as a frame for the region’s Roman, Byzantine, medieval, Ottoman, Venetian and Habsburg pasts and for the harder history of the twentieth century.

Why a Balkans history tour follows a route, not a single story

The Balkans are often presented as a single problem to be explained: a powder keg, a crossroads, a borderland between East and West. Travelling through them suggests something more varied. Each stop on this route was shaped by a different mix of powers and peoples, and the same empire could leave a very different mark in two places a day’s drive apart. Rome built roads, frontier camps and imperial residences here; Byzantium and the medieval Slavic states left churches, monasteries and fortresses; the Ottoman centuries left bridges, bazaars, mosques and baths; Venice and the Habsburgs held the coast and the northern frontier; and the twentieth century added world wars, socialist Yugoslavia, communist Albania and the conflicts of the 1990s.

Geography explains much of that variety. The mountains that give the peninsula its name divide it into valleys and basins, and our article on how the land has shaped the people of the Balkans traces how relief and climate governed where people could settle, farm and travel. For the political narrative of the region as a whole, including the Eastern Question and the emergence of modern states, our history of the Balkans, Albania and North Macedonia provides the background. This guide takes a different approach: it follows the tour’s order of travel and pauses at each stop only long enough to show which layer of the past it reveals best. Our detailed articles on individual places carry the rest.

Dubrovnik: an Adriatic sea power (Day 1)

The journey begins on the Croatian coast. On Day 1 travellers make their own way to the hotel in Dubrovnik and meet in the evening for a welcome dinner and an orientation with the group leader. It is a fitting starting point, because Dubrovnik, known for centuries as Ragusa, shows the maritime side of the region’s history. UNESCO, which inscribed the Old City of Dubrovnik on the World Heritage List in 1979, says the city “became an important Mediterranean sea power from the 13th century onwards”. It adds that the city was “severely damaged by an earthquake in 1667” and “damaged again in the 1990s by armed conflict”, two episodes still visible in the way its walls and streets have been repaired.

Dubrovnik is also a reminder that the coast and the interior of the Balkans often followed different paths. Our account of Croatia’s history from the Illyrians to independence sets Dubrovnik within that longer national story, and our guide to medieval Croatia and its kingdom covers the centuries before the Ottoman advance.

Where does the Balkans route begin and end?

The tour begins in Dubrovnik and ends in Kotor, Montenegro. On Day 19, after breakfast, the group takes a transfer to the airport. International flights are not included, and the tour page recommends arriving a day early to allow for any travel delays.

Mostar and Sarajevo: bridges, an assassination and a siege (Days 2–3)

On Day 2 the route crosses into Bosnia and Herzegovina, stopping in Mostar to view the famous bridge and to take a guided walk through the Ottoman and medieval quarters of the town before continuing to Sarajevo. In Mostar, the Old Bridge over the Neretva stands at the heart of a town that UNESCO says “developed in the 15th and 16th centuries as an Ottoman frontier town”. UNESCO, which inscribed the Old Bridge Area of the Old City of Mostar in 2005, also records that most of the historic town and the bridge were destroyed during the conflict of the 1990s and that the Old Bridge was rebuilt in 2004.

Sarajevo’s history compresses much of the route into a single city, where an Ottoman old town, the scene of a pivotal assassination and the memory of the 1990s war all meet. On Day 3 the group takes an extensive tour of the city, including the spot where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot. Britannica dates the assassination to 28 June 1914 and records that it precipitated the First World War. The tour also visits the tunnel beneath the city that was used during the war of 1992 to 1995.

Later that day the group heads north to two sites of a very different kind: a park of large stone balls and the hills near Visoko that some describe as buried pyramids. The tour page presents both as a matter of debate. Archaeologists have been sceptical: in 2006 the Boston University prehistorian Curtis Runnels told Archaeology magazine that the pyramid claims were “completely unsupported with any kind of factual evidence, such as artifacts”. The visit is best understood as a look at a modern controversy rather than an ancient monument.

Into Serbia: Višegrad, the Šargan Eight and Belgrade (Days 4–5)

Day 4 is a day of journeys. Before crossing into Serbia, the group stops to view the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge at Višegrad, which UNESCO inscribed in 2007. UNESCO records that it was built at the end of the sixteenth century by the court architect Mimar Koca Sinan on the orders of the grand vizier Mehmed Paša Sokolović. Sinan’s wider career is one of the threads in our guide to the art and architecture of the Ottoman Empire. In Serbia, the group visits Drvengrad, a village of old-style wooden buildings created by a film director for one of his films, and takes the Šargan Eight railway, which loops through the mountains in a figure of eight to cope with the change in elevation.

Belgrade, where Day 4 ends, sits where two great rivers meet, and its history follows from that position. The Belgrade Fortress, set on the ridge above the meeting of the Sava and the Danube, is where the city’s layers are easiest to read. The City of Belgrade’s official guide traces the fortress from a Roman legionary camp through Ottoman and Austrian rebuilding. On the morning of Day 5 the group tours the fortress, parts of which date to the early Roman period, and visits the Royal Palace when the day of the week allows.

The day also takes in the Residence of Princess Ljubica, which the Tourist Organisation of Belgrade says Prince Miloš Obrenović built in 1831 as a private residence for his wife. It now displays the interiors of nineteenth-century Belgrade houses, a glimpse of the city as the capital of a Serbian state emerging from Ottoman rule. The afternoon is free for the market and the old parts of the city. For the longer arc from the medieval Serbian kingdom to the twentieth century, our article on the Serbian story in Balkan history traces the Nemanjić dynasty, the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and the revolt that broke out around Belgrade in 1804.

Topola, Manasija and the Serbian heartland (Day 6)

On Day 6 the route heads south towards Kragujevac. The first stop is a memorial to those who died in the Balkan Wars and the First World War. The next is Topola, where the group visits the Church of St George at Oplenac and the mausoleum of the Karađorđević dynasty. According to the church’s own history, construction began in 1910 at the expense of King Peter I, the church was consecrated in 1912, and the remains of Karađorđe, the dynasty’s founder, were later reburied in the mausoleum. Its mosaics were made by the Berlin firm of Puhl & Wagner.

The day’s last stop takes the story back five centuries. Manasija is a fortified monastery that, according to Serbia’s submission to UNESCO’s Tentative List, was built between 1406/7 and 1418 for Despot Stefan Lazarević, with defensive walls and eleven towers. The submission places its church in the Morava school of Serbian sacred architecture; its walls and towers made the monastery a stronghold as well as a place of worship.

Niš: Roman emperors, an Ottoman frontier and twentieth-century memory (Days 7–9)

Niš, the Roman Naissus where Britannica records that Constantine the Great was born, gives the route three nights and a long reach of history. On Day 7 the group drives through the hills to the monastery of Kalenić, where it learns about the history of religion in the area and walks the monastery grounds, and then visits the Belimarković manor house, now a museum.

Day 8 brings together the Ottoman and Roman layers. The guided tour of Niš takes in its fortress and the Skull Tower. The Skull Tower in Niš, which the tour itinerary dates to 1809, was raised after the Battle of Čegar, built by the Ottoman authorities from the skulls of Serbian insurgents killed in the fighting; the National Museum Niš, which cares for the monument today, records that it originally held 952 skulls, of which 58 survive. A chapel was later built around it, and it is a sombre place to visit.

Later the group drives to Gamzigrad. Felix Romuliana, at Gamzigrad, is the late Roman palace that UNESCO says was commissioned by the emperor Galerius in the late third and early fourth centuries. UNESCO, which inscribed it in 2007, singles out the relationship between the palace and the nearby memorial complex where the mausoleums of the emperor and his mother Romula stand. The tour page notes that many of the original floor mosaics can still be seen in situ. On the way back the group stops at Medijana, on the edge of Niš, which the National Museum Niš describes as an imperial villa associated with Constantine the Great and his sons, with its most intense period of use between 330 and 361. Galerius and Constantine were among the emperors of Rome’s later centuries, and our guide to who the Roman emperors were sets out the earlier rulers whose empire they inherited.

Day 9 turns to the Second World War. The group visits the former concentration camp at Crveni Krst and the memorial at Bubanj. According to the National Museum Niš, the German occupiers set up the camp in September 1941 and held there resisters of many political views as well as large numbers of Jews and Roma. The museum records that more than 10,000 of those imprisoned were executed on Bubanj hill. The same day includes a short trip to the rock formations the tour page calls the Devil’s Towers, at Kuršumlija.

How physically demanding is the Balkans route?

The tour is rated Level 2, Moderate. The tour page states that participants must be able to carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs, be in good health and mobile, and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. Walking tours of old towns, fortresses and archaeological sites recur throughout, so if you would like to talk through a particular day, a Tour Specialist can go over it with you.

Kokino and Skopje: prehistory and Ottoman Skopje (Days 10–11)

Day 10 continues south, first to another Roman ruin with a mosaic floor, then through Vranje and across the border into North Macedonia. Kokino, high in the hills of the country’s north-east, is a prehistoric archaeological site where a local guide leads an extensive tour. North Macedonia proposed it for UNESCO’s Tentative List in 2009 as an “archaeo-astronomical site”; the submission dates the earliest finds to the Early Bronze Age and argues that markers on the summit tracked the movements of the sun and moon. That astronomical reading is an interpretation, and the tour page itself puts it carefully, saying only that “some say” the site is oriented to show the equinoxes. On the way into Skopje the group stops to see the aqueduct on the outskirts of the city.

Day 11 is spent in Skopje, which the tour page calls a city under transformation. The walking tour stops at the Daut Pasha Baths, a fifteenth-century Ottoman bathhouse that now houses the National Gallery, and at the Mustafa Pasha Mosque, which the heritage organisation HAEMUS dates to 1492 and which the tour page notes has hardly been modified since. The group also visits the old bazaar and the Memorial House of Mother Teresa. Vatican News records that she was born in Skopje on 26 August 1910 and that the memorial house, built on the site of a church destroyed in the 1963 earthquake, opened in 2009. The afternoon is spent visiting two local vineyards.

Tetovo and Lake Ohrid: dervishes, monasteries and Slavic learning (Days 12–14)

On Day 12 the group leaves Skopje for Tetovo. At Tetovo, the Arabati Baba Tekke is a Bektashi dervish lodge that a 2002 Religioscope report dated to 1538. The group visits it with a local guide, who explains its history; the same report described a dispute over its ownership between the Bektashi community and the country’s Sunni Islamic Religious Community. The road then winds south through mountains and forests to the large complex of the monastery of St John Bigorski, which, the tour page notes, claims to hold the forearm of John the Baptist.

Three nights follow in Ohrid. UNESCO first inscribed the Ohrid region for its natural values in 1979 and for its cultural heritage a year later, extending the listing to the Albanian side of the lake in 2019. It notes that “Slav culture spread from Ohrid to other parts of Europe”, and it singles out churches such as Sveta Sophia, dating from the eleventh century, for their frescoes. Day 13 is primarily a rest day, with a short tour taking in the archaeological museum and Sveta Sophia, and an afternoon cruise across the lake to the monastery of Naum, passing the Bay of Bones, a reconstruction of a pile-dwelling village built in the lake. The lake’s deep past, its churches and its school of Slavic learning are the subject of our article on Lake Ohrid and the cultural landscape of North Macedonia.

Is there free time along the way?

Yes, and it is spread through the route. The afternoon of Day 5 in Belgrade is free for the market and the old parts of the city, Day 13 in Ohrid is primarily a rest day, and Day 14 is set aside as a free day to explore the town at your own pace, perhaps visiting the Roman amphitheatre or walking beside the lake. There is also free time in Tirana on arrival on Day 16.

Along the Via Egnatia to Berat (Day 15)

On Day 15 the group leaves Ohrid and follows the route of an ancient Roman road into Albania and over the mountains. The Via Egnatia, the Roman road that Britannica says was begun in 145 BC, linked Dyrrachium (modern Durrës) on the Adriatic with Thessalonica and the routes beyond. Britannica describes it as a great east–west land route along which commerce was conducted. The tour stops at Mirake to see a bridge the tour page describes as possibly Roman, looks at remnants of the old road, and pauses at Elbasan, a staging post on the Via Egnatia, to see the castle.

The day ends in Berat with a guided walking tour of the citadel. UNESCO lists Berat with Gjirokastra as the Historic Centres of Berat and Gjirokastra, inscribed in 2005 with a boundary modification in 2008, and says that Berat “bears witness to the coexistence of various religious and cultural communities down the centuries”. Its whitewashed hillside houses, Ottoman mosques and medieval churches are explored in our article on Berat’s Ottoman houses and hillside citadel.

Apollonia and Tirana: a Greek colony and a communist capital (Days 16–17)

Day 16 heads for the coast on small, slow roads. Apollonia, near the Albanian coast, was founded in the first half of the sixth century BC by Greek colonists from Corfu and Corinth, according to the tradition cited in Albania’s 2014 submission to UNESCO’s Tentative List, and flourished under Roman rule from 229 BC. The tour page calls it a Roman port town; its origins, as the submission makes clear, were Greek.

On the road to Apollonia the group passes many of the old communist-era fortifications, including an extensive concrete tunnel network built for defence. They are the physical legacy of the decades after the Second World War, when Albania was ruled by the communist party led by Enver Hoxha; our guide to Albania’s history from Illyria to the present explains how that state came about and how it ended. The group then returns to Tirana for free time.

On Day 17 the group explores Tirana and its contrasts in architectural style, from Ottoman-era buildings to the Pyramid. Albania’s National Tourism Agency records that the Pyramid was built between 1986 and 1988 and inaugurated on 14 October 1988 in memory of Hoxha, and that it later became a conference and exhibition centre. In the afternoon the route turns north towards Montenegro, with a short stop to view the castle at Shkodër.

Kotor, Lovćen and Cetinje: the route returns to the Adriatic (Days 18–19)

The journey ends where it began, on the Adriatic. Kotor sits at the inner end of a long, winding bay, and UNESCO inscribed the Natural and Culturo-Historical Region of Kotor in 1979. The town was Venetian from 1420 until the fall of the Republic in 1797, one of a chain of ports in a trading network that our article on Venice and its merchants describes, and it was under Austrian rule from 1814 until 1918. After breakfast on Day 18 the group takes a brief walking tour of the town; its walls, cathedral and seafaring institutions are the subject of our article on Kotor, Montenegro, and its bay.

From Kotor, the road climbs in tight hairpin bends into Lovćen National Park, where the mausoleum of Petar II Petrović Njegoš stands on the summit of Jezerski vrh. The National Museum of Montenegro records that the mausoleum, designed by the sculptor and architect Ivan Meštrović, was built in 1974 in place of an earlier chapel; the tour page notes that Njegoš was buried on the mountain, moved to Cetinje and later returned. The route back passes through Cetinje, the old capital of Montenegro, with a short walking tour to see some of its older houses, before descending to the coast at Budva, with a stop to look over the sea to the island of Sveti Stefan. The day ends with a farewell dinner.

How are the nights divided along the route?

The tour includes 18 nights of hotel accommodation spread across ten bases. Following the tour page, there is one night in Dubrovnik, two in Sarajevo, two in Belgrade, one in Kragujevac, three in Niš, two in Skopje, three in Ohrid, one in Berat, one in Tirana and two in Kotor. The longer stays in Niš and Ohrid give the route its natural pauses.

Reading the Balkans in layers

Taken in order, the stops on this route read like a cross-section through the region’s past. Rome appears at Belgrade, Felix Romuliana, Medijana, the Via Egnatia and Apollonia; the medieval Slavic and Byzantine worlds at Manasija, Kalenić and Ohrid; the Ottoman centuries at Mostar, Višegrad, Sarajevo, Skopje, Tetovo and Berat; Venice and the Habsburgs at Dubrovnik, Belgrade and Kotor; and the twentieth century at Sarajevo, Niš, Tirana and Lovćen. None of these layers simply replaced the one before. Churches became mosques and churches again, fortresses changed hands and were rebuilt, and communities lived side by side in the same towns.

That is the case for seeing the Balkans as a journey rather than a list of sights. Travelling in a small group of up to 16 travellers with a Program Leader and local guides, mature travellers can follow these threads from the Adriatic to the mountains and back, with time to absorb what each place adds. By the time the route reaches Kotor, the bridges, monasteries, fortresses and memorials of the previous eighteen days have become part of a single, connected story.