Tsarigrad Road

Many passed in both directions along what was to be the Tsarigrad Road: units, groups, and military formations came to pillage and kill (the Huns), or to defend (the Roman legions), or to conquer new frontiers (the Ottoman invasions).

The Roman road was 9 strides wide (6 meters), surfaced with large polygonal tiles or with sand, and ran in straight segments, with stone bridges and milestones.

This route was the most natural and the shortest, but during the Byzantine and Slavic epochs it was generally abandoned and neglected, so that merchant caravans and delegations, for a series of centuries after the fall of the Roman state and before the arrival of the Turks in the area, used a route through Prva Kutina (formerly Banja Kutina), then through Radikina Bara, Koprivnica, and Jagličje, through Preslap (the snake meadow) beneath Mount Mosor, Veta, Toponica, Špaj, and Vrgudinac in the direction of modern Bela Palanka.

This variant of the route leading to Istanbul was apparently discovered by the Turks at the end of the fifteenth century or the start of the sixteenth, and it led through Banja, Jelašnica, and Studen, and thereafter through Bancarevo, Glogovac, Popov Šah, Špaj, and Vrgudinac to modern Bela Palanka.

For their needs, travelers, merchants, military units, Tatars, and ulaks (couriers, news-bearers, postmen), foreign and Turkish delegations, state and religious missions, pilgrims and devşirme children, bearers of wares and money, etc., used the Tsarigrad Road.

Some of the stations on the Roman road were: Mutatio ad sextum (Mali Mokri Lug), Tricornium (Ritopek), Margum (Kulič, by Smederevo), Viminacium (Kostolac), Idimmum (Medveđa), Horreum Margi (Ćuprija), Praesidium Pompei (Bovan, by Aleksinac), Naissus (Niš), Remesiana (Bela Palanka), and Turres (Pirot).

In the time of the Ottoman Empire, lodgings (konaks) on the Tsarigrad Road from Sofia to Belgrade were arranged to be reachable from the last station by a day’s walking.

Along this route today passes Highway E-80, the eastern end of the great Pan-European Corridor X, Branch C (Salzburg—Ljubljana—Zagreb—Belgrade—Niš—Sofia—Plovdiv—Edirne—Istanbul), which connects through Asia Minor with other areas of the world.