E-ROUTES is addressing the growing need of presenting and promoting scattered cultural heritage and contemporary artistic production related to travel experience in Europe both in the past and in the present time. The project objective is to collect the most important digitized or in digital form cultural and artistic objects from various cultural institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, museums – GLAM) and to provide material for the creation of thematic travel routes that follow the path of cultural heritage in four European countries: Croatia, Italy, Serbia and Slovenia. These countries and their lands were of interest to various travelers, particularly from the 18th century, after the wars and turmoil of the previous century. Historically, the four countries and their lands were divided between empires, different religions and languages, but at the same time had interlinked routes for commerce and travel, which usually follow ancient roads, rivers and marine ports. These interlinked routes and pathways inevitably provided mixing of cultures and languages, which could be well traced into the 21st century.

Following the idea that modern travelers seek quality information with added value such as points of interest, natural, cultural and historical monuments valuable for visit along the route, E-ROUTES tells the story of cultural heritage in a different manner. It provides connection between old travelogues, diaries, maps, images, etc. with the contemporary cultural, creative or artistic experiences related to the topic of travel and travel routes. That is why the project put an emphasis on time travel, as it will provide a glimpse into how different authors or writers experienced journeys through the same lands in various time periods from the 18th century onward. The project will provide a writer-in-residence program for the modern European authors interested and working on the topics about travels or travel routes. This activity will enhance cross-cultural artistic cooperation and collaboration, providing at the same time selected travel material as a basis or inspiration for the modern authors chosen for the writer-in-residence program. This way the artistic and professional community in Europe will be able to use the outputs of the project during its implementation.

For users and consumers E-ROUTES will offer a multilingual application jointly created by the partner consortia. The application will guide its users through the historic cultural routes and offer a story-telling narrative that crosses borders and national limits, with the added value of points of interest that could be visited along the routes. These points of interest beside location and image will be accompanied with the stories about each object and its history, digitized images or artistic representations from the past, with the clear inter-linked cultural denominations such as places, objects, historical events, toponyms, individuals, biographies, etc.

Project objectives are designed with an attention of the overall background of the project:

  • Objective 1: Preserving and promoting cultural and linguistic diversity of the partnering countries within the European cultural heritage and for the global audience;
  • Objective 2: Identification of the artistic material in GLAM institutions related to the project‘s topic with common inter-cultural denominations;
  • Objective 3: Development of digital collections and their ingestion into the Europeana digital library, as well as development of tools like web and mobile applications for presenting the new time travel routes for contemporary audience;
  • Objective 4: Enhancing cooperation and collaboration, establishing new ways of communication and cooperation between contemporary artists, GLAM practitioners, and audience interested in cultural heritage and cultural tourism;
  • Objective 5: Better understanding and stronger connection between participating countries which is essential for their good-neighbourly relations.