Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

The Footsteps of Egeria: How a Roman Woman Rewrote the Rules of Pilgrimage

Somewhere in the cracked dust of a 4th-century Syrian road, beneath a sun that did not yield, walked a woman alone. Not entirely alone—there were probably donkeys, guides, a few scribes—but spiritually, conceptually, she was singular. A pilgrim without a map. A tourist without Instagram. A Roman noblewoman in sensible sandals whose name, for centuries, fluttered like a ghost across parchment: Egeria.

Imagine her, clutching a wax tablet in one hand, skirts darkened with grit, scanning the horizon for Mount Sinai or the Jordan River, depending on the day. Her mission was not conquest or escape. She sought something much stranger: to see the Bible. Not read it. Not believe it. See it. Step into the dirt where Moses might have dropped his staff. Smell the fig trees that once shaded miracles.

And she wrote it down.

Her travel diary—part letter, part personal gospel—is the oldest surviving female travel writing in existence. No small feat, considering this was an era when “woman writer” was an oxymoron, and “female solo traveler” was a euphemism for something scandalous. Yet here she is, describing holy places with the precision of a cartographer and the emotion of a poet.

Egeria’s voice, preserved in a battered Latin manuscript found in an Italian monastery centuries later, is neither modest nor hysterical. It is curious, intelligent, deeply devout. There’s an almost blogger-like quality to it, minus the affiliate links: “I arrived at the well where the holy Rebekah drew water,” she might say, “and yes, it is just as the Scriptures say.”

But before she was the original Christian travel influencer, she was a woman of privilege. Probably. We don’t know her family name. We don’t know her face. But the tone of her writing—literate, commanding, peppered with references to Roman bureaucracy and ecclesiastical rituals—tells us she was wealthy, educated, and had connections high up the imperial food chain.

She addresses her letter to “sisters”—perhaps a group of nuns or spiritual confidantes back home. There’s no husband, no mention of children. Was she widowed? Consecrated? Independent by sheer force of will? The records are silent. The diary does not beg for understanding. It simply is.

The year is somewhere between 381 and 384 CE. The Roman Empire is splintering. Pagan temples are turning to rubble. Christianity, once underground, now sits on the throne, reshaping the world with new rituals and real estate. Holy places are suddenly destinations. Pilgrimage is fashion, but also faith, politics, even therapy. Men go to Jerusalem to feel closer to God. Egeria went to feel closer to the story.

Her itinerary reads like the dreamscape of a biblical scholar with unlimited frequent flyer miles: Mount Sinai. Jerusalem. Bethlehem. Galilee. Edessa. Constantinople. The Thebaid in Egypt. She walked, rode, climbed, and at one point, nearly perished from thirst in the desert. She lived off dates and barley. She observed Lent with monastic severity. She kissed relics. She gushed over sunrise liturgies.

But she also did something far more radical. She noticed.

Where other pilgrims recited piety, she recorded logistics. She described church services in minute detail—how many deacons there were, when people knelt, how long the bishop’s prayers lasted. She noted customs, dialects, hospitality patterns. She was, in modern terms, a cultural anthropologist hiding inside a nun’s habit.

There’s one passage—tiny, almost tossed off—where she explains the route from Jerusalem to Jericho. She charts it like a Google Map with divine commentary. One can almost hear her muttering under her breath about the rocky incline, the treacherous paths, the sunburned donkeys. Then she looks up, sees the ruins of the place where Jesus healed the blind man, and her tone shifts. Her words thrum.

That’s the power of her diary. It toggles between tactile and transcendent, stitching together the outer journey with the inner one.

And then—mid-sentence—she disappears.

The manuscript we have ends abruptly. One moment, she’s documenting the Easter vigil in Jerusalem. The next, silence. No epilogue. No deathbed confession. No farewell.

For scholars, it’s a cruel cliffhanger. Did she return to her sisters, sun-worn and triumphant? Did she fall ill on the road? Was her last entry lost in a fire, or censored by a bishop who found her too independent, too female, too something?

Whatever the reason, the Egeria who vanishes is not the same Egeria who began the journey. She has witnessed the architecture of myth, walked the bloodied pages of the Old Testament, and lived to write about it not as scripture, but as lived experience. She turned faith into itinerary. And in doing so, she carved out a space in literary history where no woman had stood before.

That space, by the way, was nearly forgotten.

Her manuscript—Itinerarium Egeriae—wasn’t rediscovered until 1884, when an Italian scholar stumbled upon a copy in the dusty stacks of a Monte Cassino library. What he found was fragmentary, but enough to set historians buzzing. Here, at last, was a woman’s voice from Late Antiquity not preserved in legend or martyrology, but in her own words. A real-time dispatch from the heart of the early Christian world.

Today, if you google “female travel writer,” you’ll find thousands of names. Instagrammers in Bali. Essayists in Kabul. Memoirists chasing grief and coffee in equal measure. But all of them—knowingly or not—owe something to the woman who first picked up a stylus and dared to write the world as she saw it.

Egeria didn’t call herself a feminist. The word didn’t exist. She wouldn’t have identified as a travel writer either. But in retracing the steps of saints, she became something else entirely: a cartographer of longing. A woman who turned dust into meaning.

And meaning, unlike roads, does not crumble with time.

So the next time you scroll past a photo of Jerusalem at golden hour, or hear someone sigh about “finding themselves in the desert,” spare a thought for Egeria. The original Christian pilgrim. The first female solo traveler. The woman who wrote her way into history one blistered step at a time.

Because before there were apps, there were maps. Before there were influencers, there were seekers. And before there was travel content, there was Egeria—recording the sacred with ink, sand, and soul.