Via Egnatia: Rome’s Road Across the Balkans and the Meaning of Movement

Somewhere above the Shkumbin valley in eastern Albania, a line of worn limestone slabs runs between the oaks, the edge stones still in place, the surface polished by more than two thousand years of feet, hooves and wheels. This is the Via Egnatia, the road Rome drove east from the Adriatic across the mountains of what are now Albania and North Macedonia, towards Thessalonica and, in time, Byzantium. Armies, officials, merchants, pilgrims and apostles all used it, and later empires laid their own routes along its line. On Day 15 of our small group Balkans tour from Dubrovnik to Kotor, the group leaves Ohrid and follows the route of this ancient road into Albania, stopping at Mirakë (the tour page spells it Mirake) and Elbasan on the way to Berat.

Why the Via Egnatia matters on a Balkans route

Many of the places on a Balkans itinerary are destinations: a citadel, a monastery, a bridge, an old town. The Via Egnatia is something different. It is the reason many of those places sit where they do, and the thread that ties a Roman station, a Byzantine bishopric and an Ottoman fortress town into a single story about how people, goods and power moved across difficult country. Our overview of the Balkans history tour and its route through crossroads and empires sets out the wider journey; this article stays with the road itself, and with the stretch of it the tour actually travels.

That stretch matters because the western end of the road crossed difficult ground. Between Lake Ohrid and the Adriatic plain, it had to climb over mountain passes and thread the valley of the Shkumbin river. Travelling it from east to west, as the tour does, reverses the direction in which its miles were counted, from the Adriatic eastwards, and follows the direction in which the Ottomans later used it.

Building Rome’s road east

Britannica records that construction of the Via Egnatia began in 145 BC, and describes it as an extension of the Via Appia, running from Dyrrachium (modern Durrës, in Albania) through the Roman province of Macedonia to Thessalonica and on into Thrace. Livius.org describes how travellers from Italy crossed the Adriatic to land at Dyrrachium or Apollonia and continue overland. The road took its name from its builder. The same Livius.org account identifies him as Gnaeus Egnatius, a Roman senator who governed the province of Macedonia with the powers of a proconsul in the late 140s BC. His work is attested by a bilingual milestone found near the Gallikos river, just west of Thessaloniki, now in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, which records a distance of 260 miles to Dyrrachium.

The Greek geographer Strabo, writing in the early first century AD, gives a detailed ancient description of the route. In the 1924 Loeb translation of his Geography (7.7.4), he writes that “from Apollonia to Macedonia one travels the Egnatian Road, towards the east”, and that it had been “measured by Roman miles and marked by pillars as far as Cypsela and the Hebrus River — a distance of five hundred and thirty-five miles”. Strabo, quoting the earlier historian Polybius, gives 267 miles for the stretch as far as Thessalonica. He also explains how the road began: from the coast around Epidamnus (Dyrrachium) and Apollonia, the western section was known as “the Road to Candavia (an Illyrian mountain)”, and it passed through Lychnidus and a place called Pylon, “which marks the boundary between the Illyrian country and Macedonia”.

The road did not stop at the Hebrus. Livius notes that a speech of Cicero shows the road had been extended through southern Thrace to the Hellespont before 56 BC, and that it later continued to Perinthus and Byzantium. Its total length, on Livius’s estimate, must have been about 1,120 kilometres.

Stations on the road, from Lychnidos to Scampa

Roman roads were organised around stopping places: the larger mansiones, where travellers could stay overnight, and the smaller mutationes, where animals were changed. On the western section of the Via Egnatia, several of these can still be placed on the map, and the tour’s Day 15 passes close to a number of them.

The eastern starting point of the day is Ohrid itself. Britannica records that the town, known in Classical antiquity as Lykhnidos, had become by the second century BC a post on the Via Egnatia; the group spends Days 12 to 14 there, and its churches, lake and Roman theatre are the subject of our article on Lake Ohrid and the town of Ohrid. West of the lake, the road climbed into the mountains Strabo called Candavia and crossed into the Illyrian country beyond Pylon.

On the Albanian side, archaeologists have tied several sites to stations named in the ancient road itineraries. A 2001 paper in the Journal of Roman Archaeology by Maria Grazia Amore, Lorenc Bejko, Ylli Cerova and Ilir Gjipali reports a survey carried out in April and May 2000 by the Albanian Rescue Archaeology Unit with the Institute of Archaeology of Albania, walking the line of the road between Qukës, identified as the station In Tabernas (Tres Tabernae), and Bradashesh near Elbasan, identified as Ad Quintum. The Municipality of Elbasan describes Ad Quintum, on the Elbasan to Peqin road, as one of the important Roman constructions on the Via Egnatia, and dates the station to the second to fourth centuries AD.

Further west, near modern Peqin, lay the station of Clodiana, where AramcoWorld’s account places the junction with a branch road from Apollonia. That Greek and Roman city near the coast is the subject of our article on Apollonia in Albania, which the tour visits on Day 16. From there the two branches ran together towards Scampa, modern Elbasan, and the mountains beyond.

Armies, apostles and emperors on the road

A road built to move legions soon carried everything else as well, and the Via Egnatia’s history reads like a list of Rome’s turning points. Livius notes that Sulla’s armies used it in 84 BC; that in the winter of 49 to 48 BC Caesar and Pompey fought for control of its western end at Dyrrachium; and that the armies of Antony and Octavian, and of Brutus and Cassius, all travelled it before the battle at Philippi. For a time, the struggle for the Roman world was a struggle for this road.

It carried ideas as well as soldiers. The Acts of the Apostles (16:11 to 17:1) follows Paul from the port of Neapolis to Philippi, then through Amphipolis and Apollonia (a different town from the Albanian city of that name) to Thessalonica, a sequence of towns strung along the eastern part of the road. Under the emperors the road was maintained as a working artery. Milestones, Livius records, show repairs under Trajan, Marcus Aurelius and Septimius Severus. The first two appear in our guide to who the Roman emperors were and how they governed.

In Thessalonica, the road ran through the heart of the city. A triumphal arch was built there to celebrate Galerius’s victory over the Persians; his palace complex at Felix Romuliana in eastern Serbia is on the tour’s Day 8. The official tourism site of the Region of Central Macedonia dates the arch to around AD 300, in the early fourth century, and notes that it stands today in the centre of Thessaloniki on Egnatia Street, which follows the line of the ancient road.

Byzantine and Ottoman roads on a Roman line

When Constantinople became the eastern capital, the Via Egnatia became its road to the west. Livius notes that the sixth-century historian Procopius credits the emperor Justinian with repairing it, and that a ceremonial Golden Gate at Constantinople was used for the triumphal entries of Byzantine emperors arriving along it. Merchants, soldiers and monks used the road through the Byzantine centuries, a period our article on the history of the Balkans, Albania and North Macedonia places in its regional context.

The Ottomans reversed the direction of travel. AramcoWorld describes how they used the old line as a main corridor west, especially during their Balkan conquests of the late fourteenth century, and called it the Sol Kol, the “Left Arm” of the road network of Rumeli. Elbasan itself is an Ottoman refoundation on the Roman road: Britannica records that the town was founded in 1466 by Sultan Mehmed II on the site of ancient Scampis, as a base for his campaigns against the Albanian commander Skanderbeg. The line was still being repaired in the twentieth century: AramcoWorld notes work on the road during the Italian occupation of Albania in the 1940s.

What survives on the Day 15 road

Very little of the Roman surface survives anywhere, which is what makes the Albanian stretch worth slowing down for. AramcoWorld’s 2015 account, drawing on the Via Egnatia Foundation’s guidebook, puts the surviving original paving at “less than one percent” of the route, mostly in Albania, where some sections around four metres wide are still well paved and the road is known locally as Rruga Egnatia. The same account notes a complication: repairs carried out during the Italian occupation of Albania in the 1940s make it hard to tell Roman, Ottoman and Italian stonework apart.

Reconstructing the course of the road has therefore been a task for archaeologists as much as for walkers. In his 2003 study La via Egnatia I, which follows the road from Apollonia and Dyrrachium eastwards, the Italian scholar Michele Fasolo traced its path using aerial photographs from the 1930s, as Gregory Bucher’s review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review notes. The Albanian survey reported by Amore and her colleagues stresses that the road remained in use into modern times, which helps explain both why so much of it was overlaid and why its line can still be followed in the landscape.

The tour page puts it simply: while on the Via Egnatia, the group sees remnants of the old Roman road. Seen against the sources above, those remnants look less like a museum piece than a working route, patched and rebuilt by every power that needed it.

Is the bridge at Mirakë Roman?

Possibly, though the evidence points the other way. The tour page describes the ancient bridge at Mirakë as “possibly Roman”. The best-known historic bridge at Mirakë is the single-arch Ura e Kamarës over the Shkumbin, which AramcoWorld’s 2015 account describes as Ottoman-built; if that is the bridge on the itinerary, its masonry is more likely Ottoman, standing on the line of the Roman road.

AramcoWorld places Mirakë at the point where the old road leaves the Shkumbin river and begins to climb. Whatever the age of its masonry, the bridge marks a point on a route that travellers have used since Roman times.

Elbasan: a staging post inside the walls

The tour page calls Elbasan a staging post on the Via Egnatia, and its castle shows why. The Municipality of Elbasan describes the Roman fortress of Skampis as a castrum built to an orthogonal plan, like other Roman military camps, and notes that the walls of today’s castle were built by the Ottomans on its foundations.

In and around the walls, the town’s later layers sit close together. The Municipality of Elbasan lists the King Mosque inside the fortress near its main gate, the clock tower within the castle area and the Hamam of the Castle, and describes the Basilica of Bezistan, just south of the fortress walls, as a fifth-century monument discovered in 2007 with around 25 square metres of mosaics. On Day 15 the group stops in Elbasan to see the castle and eat lunch within its grounds.

How much walking does the Via Egnatia day involve?

Day 15 is built around the road, with stops at Mirakë, along the old road and at Elbasan before a guided walk through the citadel at Berat. The tour page does not give distances for these stops, and the tour as a whole is rated Level 2, Moderate: participants must be able to carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. If you would like to talk through what that means for you, a Tour Specialist can help.

Where does the route go after the Via Egnatia?

From Elbasan the tour turns south, leaving the line of the road for the hillside town covered in our article on Berat, Albania and its citadel, where the group takes a guided walking tour on arrival. On Day 16 the route continues to the coast and Apollonia, then to Tirana, before the journey ends in Kotor, Montenegro. For the deeper background to the country the road crosses, our guide to Albania’s history from Illyria to the modern state fills in the national story.

What the road connected

It is tempting to treat a Roman road as a monument: a stretch of paving to photograph, a milestone in a museum. The Via Egnatia resists that reading. Its value lies in what it connected, and in the soldiers, apostles, emperors and officials who used it for very different ends.

Travelling a short stretch of it from Ohrid to Elbasan, mature travellers in a small group of up to 16 travellers can see that history at ground level: in the line of the road through the mountains, in a bridge whose date is still debated, and in a castle whose Ottoman walls stand on Roman foundations. The road reminds us that the Balkans have rarely been a place people simply lived in. They have also been a place people moved through, and the paths they took still shape the land.