From Travel Narratives to Cultural Routes: Interpreting via Egnatia as a Heritage Corridor

Cultural Routes have become important instruments for promoting shared heritage and sustainable tourism across Europe, yet the potential of travel literature to inform their development remains underexplored, particularly in the case of Via Egnatia. This study addresses this gap by developing a theoretical distinction between travel narratives as ideologically situated representations, shaped by colonial and Orientalist discourse, and as potentially corroborable sources of historical–geographical evidence. It applies this framework to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century accounts by Byron, Leake, Lear, and Durham, published between 1812 and 1909. Using a qualitative, theory-informed case-study design, the study combines critical discourse analysis with the thematic coding of 127 narrative references, supported by a documented codebook, an intra-coder consistency check (84% agreement), and triangulation across authors and independent historical and archaeological sources. The analysis identifies documentary support for a mobility corridor along the Shkumbin Valley, derived primarily from the convergence between Leake and Lear and consistent with independent archaeological scholarship. A site-level cross-check of six heritage assets and a small purposive sample of recent visitor reviews provides preliminary indications that formal heritage protection already exists along the corridor, while visitor-facing interpretation does not consistently connect individual sites to a coherent Via Egnatia narrative. A similar pattern emerges from the analysis of Albania’s national tourism-planning documents. The study’s principal contribution is theoretical: it shows how critically read travel narratives can extend destination-storytelling and heritage-interpretation theory beyond descriptive associations, while offering a potentially transferable methodological framework for translating narrative and empirical evidence into interpretive practice for the Council of Europe Cultural Routes Programme.