Via Egnatia

The surveyed line starts at Dyrrhachium, with a second arm coming up from the south past Apollonia and Byllis; the two probably met near Peqin. The road then followed the Shkumbin valley to Scampis at Elbasan and climbed through the Candavia mountains to Lychnidos on Lake Ohrid.

From Ohrid it crossed the uplands to Herakleia Lynkestis outside Bitola, a city founded by Philip II, then turned east over the passes to Edessa. It came down to Pella, the old Macedonian royal capital, and on to Thessalonike, seat of the Roman governor.

East of Thessalonike it passed Apollonia and Amphipolis on the Strymon, ran through the centre of Philippi and came down to the sea at Neapolis, modern Kavala. Thrace followed: Mosynopolis near Komotini, Traianoupolis near Alexandroupoli, then Cypsela at the crossing of the Hebrus, the Evros of today. One arm of the survey reaches south towards Kallipolis on the Hellespont. The main line strikes north-east to the Sea of Marmara at Rhaidestos, now Tekirdağ, and follows the shore through Herakleia Perinthos and Selymbria to Constantinopolis.

No single modern road follows the whole line. In Albania the road east from Rrogozhinë through Peqin and Elbasan keeps to the Shkumbin valley as the Roman engineers did. In North Macedonia the road from Ohrid through Resen to Bitola crosses the same high ground. In Greece the old national road, the EO2, is the truer heir: Florina, Edessa, Giannitsa near Pella, Thessaloniki, Amphipolis, Kavala, Komotini and Alexandroupoli all lie on it.

The A2 motorway, the Egnatia Odos, borrows the name but only part of the route. It begins at Igoumenitsa, far south of the Roman road, and picks up the ancient corridor at Thessaloniki; from there to the Evros it runs roughly parallel for some 360 kilometres. In Turkey the D110 carries the line along the Marmara coast through Tekirdağ and Silivri into Istanbul.

The best stretch is at Philippi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2016, where the road served as the main street past the forum; its marble slabs still carry cartwheel ruts. A few kilometres north-west of Kavala, between Stavros and Agios Silas, roughly a kilometre of paving climbs the saddle between the plain of Philippi and the sea. The Gallikos milestone of Gnaeus Egnatius is in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki.

Further west, the excavated city of Herakleia Lynkestis outside Bitola has a Roman theatre and early Christian floor mosaics. Original cobbles from the road are displayed inside the castle at Elbasan. In Istanbul, the Golden Gate in the Theodosian walls at Yedikule was the ceremonial entrance for emperors returning in triumph from the west.