Traveltrails: Missions and Explorations in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1500 -1830

Abstract

TravelTrails is an online database, which indexes, categorizes and analyzes travelers’ accounts in the Eastern Mediterranean from the early sixteenth-century up to 1830. Based on the collections of the Gennadius Library and the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, it helps the user to navigate through the diverse and rich historical information contained in travel literature. The overall objective is to explore travelers’ texts from various angles and perspectives, offering the user maximum information contained on a variety of themes, from architecture to everyday life, food to legal issues, politics to craftsmanship, etc. The information is arranged in broad thematic units subdivided into many subsections; excerpts can be retrieved by looking for a specific traveler/book, place, subject or keyword. TravelTrails currently focuses on travelers’ accounts of the sixteenth century. The entire body of literature up to 1830, with more than 10,000 entries, is still being processed, and it will be incorporated progressively.