Roman Trails - On the Trail of the Romans in the Weinviertel Region and in South Moravia

Project start: 01 May 2024 Parts of the Weinviertel and South Moravia regions enjoy the benefits of a strong tourism, but visitors often concentrate on a few selected places, while individual areas are little or not at all visited. The overall goal of the project is to create a common, cross-border thematic region based on the Roman history north of the Danube (little known to the public) and to establish interactive (long-distance) hiking trails (also for cyclists) along the traces of Roman history. The historical theme of the Romans in the Weinviertel and South Moravia can only be conveyed in its entirety across borders, and the overarching historical theme of the project conveys very vividly that the current borders are a modern product. On the contrary, in the Roman past, the territories of South Moravia and Lower Austria north of the Danube represented an undivided cultural unit and a unified arena for the operations of the Roman army and, as a result, for civilian interaction with the local population. The joint branding of the thematic region "Romans north of the Danube" and the implementation of the Roman Trails, which make the past visible by means of digital copies of Roman finds and virtually reconstructed Roman landscapes, ensure higher visitor numbers in areas that have so far had little or no established tourism. The focus of the project lies on ecological and sustainable tourism development with the involvement of local gastronomy and value creation and ensures that the surrounding landscape and nature are not harmed. The conception and joint implementation of interactive workshops and guided tours on selected topics of Roman history opens an economic field in the thematic region that will be established together with local museums, archaeological sites, tourism associations and cultural mediators. The partner consortium, which is made up of partner organisations and strategic partners from the programme regions, tackles the topic in three successive steps, always based on and with the involvement of the target groups (local and regional authorities, sectoral agencies, interest groups, universities, schools, local and regional SMEs and the public as future visitors). In the first step, a strategy for sustainable and green tourism is developed, as is the thematic region "Romans north of the Danube". In the second step, Roman finds from the Weinviertel and South Moravia will be digitized, and Roman landscapes will be virtually reconstructed. Both digital tools are prepared in such a way that they are not only suitable for the Roman Trails, but also for scientific purposes, databases and presentations in museums. In the ultimate step, based on the strategy, the Roman Trails will be implemented and tested in order to establish a functioning network of tourism offers at the end of the project, based on a cross-border networked thematic region. Innovative and promising for tourists is the combination of trails for hikers and cyclists with the Roman history of the Weinviertel and South Moravia (little or not at all known to the general public), and thus north of the Danube Limes, which is commonly seen as the "hard" border of the Imperium Romanum and the presentation of history in an interactive accompaniment of the trails, which in turn embeds the trails into the historic landscape.