With a sharp haircut, chunky gold chain and glistening trainers, he spoke just enough English, Arabic and Greek to maintain absolute control – the migrants cowered around him, deferential, wary, the relationship of sex-workers with their pimp. There were two young women in the group – one was carrying a tiny baby, the other had been raped, by someone, she did not know who, en route.  Crossing the borders of Turkey, Greece, Macedonia/FYROM and Albania, the Via Egnatia is still a short-cut west – those Romans were good for nothing if not ascertaining the most direct access from A to B. Via Egnatia’s sister track, the old military road between Istanbul and Edirne (ancient Adrianopolis), along which Mehmet the Conqueror had marched in 1453 to capture Constantinople, is the other route used by lines of footsore refugees trying to walk into the EU.  The Sultans Topkapi Palace at sunset, Istanbul, Turkey.  While I was heading east, close on 2,000 migrants were being held in Edirne’s sports stadium waiting to continue their journey west. There is no little irony that a road system originally constructed under the watchful eye of the proconsul Gnaeus Egnatius around 146BC to suppress the natives in Rome’s newly conquered province of Macedonia, has become one of the key players in the movement of people, ideas and cultures through time and across the East-West divide.  Still functioning in some stretches and still called Egnatia Odos in Greece and Rruga Egnatia in Albania, the Via Egnatia has seen so much history it is a ribbon of archaeological activity.  "Mentioning that I had two daughters in the UK, my host quickly tried to barter me a bridegroom (her “good-looking” great-nephew) and unlimited Macedonian holidays"  At the start of my journey, after a nine hour boat-ride from the heel of Italy (plied by round-nosed Roman galleys in antiquity, today by ferries transporting truck-drivers shifting everything from control pants to yoghurt) to the coastal city of Durres (ancient Dyrrachium) in Albania (ancient Illyria), I was whisked off by a stout and excited professor of archaeology to a house cellar where an exquisite early Christian mosaic of Orpheus had recently been discovered.  Further east in Edessa, a splendid stone inscription from the second century AD, reused in a Byzantine wall, commemorates the world’s first recorded traffic accident. Eccentrically, the fatality honoured by this headstone is a pig. The endearing creature, the stele tells us in both words and in storyboard images, had been travelling as a pet along the road, but was then trampled to death by a four-horse chariot charging down the wrong lane.  Bettany by the wall commemmorating the first traffic accident.  There is an inherent dynamism to these pathways, whether it be then or now. One whiskery Macedonian villager who had been taught songs of the road by her grandfather led me up to her idyllic, wall-flower-thick homestead overlooking Lake Ohrid. We drank raki and she sang of the men who had travelled here between the wars, staring at the clouds and hoping they would carry messages back to their loved ones.  Mentioning that I had two daughters in the UK, my host quickly tried to barter me a bridegroom (her “good-looking” great-nephew) and unlimited Macedonian holidays.  "Forced transportations followed the disastrous exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, when 1.5 million Christians were cleared from Asia Minor and 700,000 Muslims from Greece"  Next to the road in Albania, a priest whose father had been de-frocked by the Communist dictator Enver Hoxha also burst in to song, describing the night his neighbours had betrayed his family when his father sang an Easter mass. Father Marku calls the Via Egnatia itself a “saint” because it fostered the spread of Christianity. St Paul did indeed travel the road, and next to the crisply, cold Angitis River made his first conversion (of Lydia) in Philippi.  The New Testament relates that it was here Paul also cried out: “Believe in Lord Jesus and you will be saved!” So for both scriptural and practical reasons the Via Egnatia became a spine of piety – church foundations and monasteries bristling along the route.  Staying in one of the oldest, the Monastery of the Shining Icon, the tiny, toothless Mother Superior told me anyone was welcome here, that the purpose of a road was to accept and to connect strangers. Certainly, once Ottomans rather than Romans and Byzantines became masters of the route, Bektashi Tekkes – lodges sponsored by those Ottoman ex-Christian soldiers the Janissaries – offered food and shelter to all, irrespective of religion.  When the Bektashis (a hybrid Muslim, Christian, Sufi, Shaman faith) were driven underground following the Sultan’s disbandment of the Janissaries in 1826 and replacement with the Victorious Soldiers of Muhammed, a roadside structure for inter-faith connection between Europe and Asia was snapped.  In one of the last functioning Bektashi lodges on the Asian shores of Istanbul, the Dede told me, as his staff fed just some of the 3,000 they provide with free food every week, that the point of god was only love – that the true god belonged to all faiths, all humans, that we are god because we are love.  And in 1923, the Via Egnatia facilitated hate and severance. Forced transportations followed the disastrous exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, when 1.5 million Christians were cleared from Asia Minor and 700,000 Muslims from Greece. There is no doubt this mass re-settlement has exacerbated tensions in the region.  In the ghost village of Chortokopiou in Northern Greece, just above the remains of the road, abandoned by Muslims and then re-populated by Pontic Greeks, I picked over broken arches and a collapsed school room with the neurosurgeon Dr Silviarides, who lived here as a child.  Eyes pricking with tears he remembered his grandmother weeping for her Turkish friends and her lost home overlooking the Black Sea, and the tales of the families like his with one suitcase making the self-same journeys 90 years ago that those migrants from the Middle East are now tracing along the Egnatian Way.  When that toothbrush-lacking young Syrian in Thessaloniki finally plucked up courage to talk, I asked what he hoped the West would offer him. His response was simple: “I just want to finish my law degree…” he trailed off. “SYRIA IS A MESS,” he tapped out on his phone as I left.  Neuroscientists now tell us our brain can reach an alpha state when we walk; we are, after all, hard-wired to be nomads. Roads should encourage not just migrants, but minds to travel. Let us hope that those who are ranging along the Via Egnatia now can use their wit and will to transport ideas rather than ideologies; to become not a problem, but part of a solution to a repetitive history.  • The final part of Dr Bettany Hughes’ latest series, Ancient Ways, is on Radio 4 on Friday 11am. To listen to previous episodes, go to www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06st1cy. She is currently writing a new history of Istanbul
Bettany Hughes travels the 'Via Egnatia', an old Roman road built between   Italy and Istanbul and hears of the suffering of dispossessed migrants