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The Egnatia road Via Egnatia (Greek: Εγνατία Οδός) is the infrastructural work with which the Romans, starting from the second half of the 2 nd century B. C., structured the millenary route that ran from the southern regions of the Adriatic coast to the northern Aegean, ensuring thus communications from East to West. Strabo bears witness that, at its western end, on the Adriatic coast, this road started from the town of Apollonia.A road coming from Epidamnos (Dyrrachium) - conventionally called in studies as the "northern branch of Via Egnatia" or, more usually and easily, "Via Egnatia" - joined Via Egnatia in a point that, according to Strabo, was equidistant from the two above mentioned towns. Such intersection, at least in the period when the two itineraries contained in the entire Itinerarium Provinciarum were written, coincided with the site of Clodiana, or had such site in its neighbourhood as its subsequent statio, that was called "mansio Coladiana" in a third source of itineraries, the Itinerarium Burdigalense. After the two roads met in a single route, the latter took the middle valley of Shkumbin climbing it up until Sopi i Polis hill, in the area of Haxhi Beqarit, where the ancient road was forced to pass from the right to the left banks of Shkumbin, due to the morphology of the valley itself. According to Strabo, from this region on, or maybe from farther downhill, the road was surely called the "road of Candavia", from the name of an Illyrian mountain. This section of the road crossed in fact some highlands which, at that time, were supposed to stretch at least until the Lychnidòs lake region (Ochrida lake, lakes of Prespa and Mikra Prespa). From Lychnidòs, the road went on towards the mountain passes along which ran the border between Illyricum and Macedonia. Through such passes, the route let into a district of the northern Macedonia, Lyncestyde, and its main centre, Herakleia Lynkestidos, where another route of the great road junction of Stobi came. The Egnatia road touched then Edessa and thus, after crossing the Macedonian plain, it reached Thessalonica through Pella. This town on the thermaic gulf, however, was located only at the middle of the route which ended at Cipsela on the Ebro and that only later was continued until Byzantium. The Via Egnatia undoubtedly falls within that category of roads which take their name from their builder, or better from the person who paved them, rather than from their function or point of arrival,and the find of 1974 in the alluvial soils of Gallikos river near Thessalonica of a milestone bearing the name of the builder confirms such theory. Festo and Flacco Siculo 18 themselves report this tradition, and the latter affirmed, about in the 2 nd century A. C., "nam sunt viae, quae publice muniuntur et auctorum nominem optinent". The person who executed such work was in fact the Roman magistrate Cnaeus Egnatius, son of Caius, quoted in the milestone discovered in 1974, of whom no other information is known for the time being, besides his name and capacity as proconsul. The Via Egnatia was repaired and expanded several times. It remained an important commercial and strategic route for centuries, and was one of the most important roads in the Byzantine Empire, connecting Dyrrhachium on the Adriatic with Thessalonica, Adrianople, and finally Constantinople on the Bosporus. Almost all overland trade with western Europe travelled along the Via Egnatia. During the Crusades, armies travelling to the east by land followed the road to Constantinople before crossing into Asia Minor. In the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, control of the road was vital for the survival of the Latin Empire as well as the Byzantine successor states the Empire of Nicaea and the Despotate of Epirus.

http://xoomer.virgilio.it/mifasolo/pdf/inglese.pdf

Michele Fasolo: La via Egnatia I. Da Apollonia e Dyrrachium ad Herakleia Lynkestidos Istituto Grafico Editoriale Romano, Roma 2003

• Roman roads
• Byzantine Empire