The 1,400km Via Transilvanica, runs diagonally across Romania from north-east to south-west, mostly through the mountains, forests, and villages of the Transylvania region.
It joins together some of Europe’s most traditional landscapes and communities with 12 Unesco World Heritage sites.
The route was launched two years ago (it’s already the winner of a Europa Nostra Award recognising outstanding heritage conservation initiatives) and passes through some of Europe’s most traditional landscapes, rich in bears and wolves. It also ticks off 12 Unesco World Heritage sites and brings new life (and revenue) to remote, rural communities – communities that still scythe hay by hand, travel around by horse and cart and eat food they’ve grown themselves.
And crucially the route also connects some 18 different ethnic and cultural regions in the rich tapestry that constitutes modern-day Romania. Which is why it has been dubbed “the road that unites”.
Tag: UNESCO World Heritage Site
History is full of long and legendary highways but none – frankly – come close to the Silk Road. It’s not just the magnitude (at least 4,000 miles, in more than 40 countries) but the mythic potency of the project. The world was cleft into east and west in the Middle Ages.
But long before, the Silk Road – which has existed in one form or another since the fourth century BC – breached any such divide. While trade was its raison d’être – Chinese silk, of course, but also salt, sugar, spices, ivory, jade, fur and other luxury goods – the road forged deep social, cultural and religious links between disparate peoples.
And
The Silk Road was not a road, but a network. The central caravan tract followed the Great Wall, climbed the Pamir Mountains into Afghanistan, and crossed to the Levant. Along the way were spurs branching off to river ports, caravanserai, oases, markets and pilgrimage centres. Journeys demanded meticulous preparation: the Silk Road and its tributaries cut through some of the harshest, highest, wildest places on Earth.
Read More at The Telegraph (paywall)…
