TravelTrails: Travels and Explorations in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1500 – 1830
TravelTrails: Travels and Explorations in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1500-1830 (traveltrails.gr) is an innovative trilingual website (English - Greek - Turkish), which systematically documents texts of European travelers who have wandered around or participated in missions in the Ottoman Empire and areas of Greek territory under Venetian rule. It is based on materials from The Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and The Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation.
TravelTrails makes the richness of the travelers’ accounts accessible to the general public by organizing the information into thematic sections, geographic criteria, and related tags. The user is offered the possibility to perform general or specialized searches, combining one or more search criteria, studying and identifying places, monuments, people, groups, professions, customs, and other subjects.
The TravelTrails website includes 471 accounts in their original language and 11,000 entries, which will be presented to the public progressively. To date, the user can browse travel books of the 16th century.
TravelTrails aim to facilitate research on a wide range of issues in the Eastern Mediterranean basin and to become a repository of information for a period not so well known to the general public.