History of Pilgrimage: From Ancient Shrines to Modern Walking Routes

The earliest evidence of pilgrimage blurs into the earliest evidence of religion itself. Ancient Egyptians travelled to festivals at temple cities along the Nile, and the Greek historian Herodotus described great crowds arriving by boat for the festival of the goddess Bastet at Bubastis. In Greece, sanctuaries such as Delphi, Olympia and Epidaurus drew visitors from across the Mediterranean, to consult the oracle, attend the games held in honour of Zeus or seek a cure from Asclepius, the god of healing. The link between sacred places and healing waters runs through much of the ancient world, as the story of health spa culture from ancient public baths traces.

In India, the idea of the tirtha, a crossing place where the human and divine worlds meet, has shaped pilgrimage for well over two thousand years. Many tirthas lie on rivers. Hindus believe that bathing in the Ganges washes away sins, and the city of Varanasi on its banks has drawn pilgrims for centuries, some coming to die there in the belief that death in the city brings liberation from rebirth. The Kumbh Mela, a festival held in rotation at four river sites, regularly draws crowds counted in the tens of millions, and UNESCO added it to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2017.

According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha himself recommended four places for his followers to visit: Lumbini, where he was born; Bodh Gaya, where he attained enlightenment; Sarnath, where he first taught; and Kushinagar, where he died. Those four sites in present-day Nepal and northern India remain at the heart of Buddhist pilgrimage.

As Buddhism spread across Asia, pilgrims travelled in the other direction to find its sources. The Chinese monk Faxian set out for India around 400 CE and returned with texts after more than a decade. Two centuries later Xuanzang made an even longer trip, and his account of the kingdoms he crossed is still a key source for historians of Central and South Asia. In Tibet and the Himalaya, pilgrimage took the form of the kora, a walk around a sacred mountain, lake or temple, always keeping it on the right. The cliffside monastery climbed by visitors in this story about Bhutan’s Himalayan harmony is one such site, and the monasteries along the road to Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh are another.

Christian pilgrimage developed after the Roman Empire accepted Christianity in the fourth century. Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, travelled to the Holy Land in the 320s, and churches were built on sites linked with the life of Jesus. A few decades later a woman named Egeria, probably from Gaul or Spain, wrote a long letter describing her travels to Jerusalem, Sinai and Egypt. It is one of the earliest surviving pilgrim accounts by a woman.

Rome, with the tombs of the apostles Peter and Paul, became the second great goal. The third took longer to emerge. In the early ninth century a tomb in Galicia, in the far northwest of Spain, was identified as that of the apostle James, and a church was built over it. Over the following centuries the routes to Santiago de Compostela grew into a network of roads across Europe, lined with hospices, monasteries and bridges built for the people walking them. A twelfth-century manuscript, the Codex Calixtinus, includes what is often called the first travel guide, with advice on the stages of the route, the rivers, the food and the people encountered on the way.

Shrines multiplied across medieval Europe. After Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 and canonised three years later, his tomb became one of the most visited sites in England. Geoffrey Chaucer set his Canterbury Tales among a group of pilgrims riding there, and the book’s mix of the devout and the worldly suggests that pilgrimage was also a holiday, a social occasion and a chance to see a bit of the country.

The Reformation brought a sharp decline in parts of northern Europe, where shrines were destroyed and pilgrimage was discouraged. In Catholic countries it continued, and new sites emerged, such as Lourdes in France after 1858. The Camino de Santiago faded to a trickle by the twentieth century before a revival from the 1980s. In 1987 it became the first Cultural Route of the Council of Europe, and in 1993 the Spanish routes joined UNESCO’s World Heritage List. The modern Compostela certificate requires at least the final 100 kilometres on foot or horseback, or 200 kilometres by bicycle.

For Muslims, the Hajj to Mecca is one of the five pillars of Islam, an obligation for every adult who is physically and financially able to make it at least once. It takes place each year in the Islamic month of Dhu al-Hijjah, and because the Islamic calendar is lunar, its date moves about eleven days earlier each year in the Gregorian calendar. Pilgrims wear simple white garments, circle the Kaaba, stand in prayer on the plain of Arafat and perform the symbolic stoning of the devil at Mina.

Before modern transport the Hajj could take months or years. Caravans set out from Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad, and the routes created their own infrastructure of wells, forts and markets. In 1325 a young scholar from Tangier, Ibn Battuta, set out for Mecca and kept travelling for nearly three decades, reaching China, East Africa and Mali. His account remains one of the great travel narratives of any age.

Today most pilgrims arrive by air.

Saudi Arabia sets national quotas for foreign pilgrims, and the 2025 Hajj drew 1,673,230 people, about 1.5 million of them from abroad. The lesser pilgrimage, the Umrah, can be made at any time of year and draws millions more.

Some pilgrimages are not about arriving but about going round, and Japan has two of the best-known routes in Asia. On the Japanese island of Shikoku, pilgrims follow a circuit of 88 Buddhist temples linked with the monk Kūkai, known after his death as Kōbō Daishi. The full loop runs about 1,200 kilometres, and walkers, known as henro, often wear white and carry a staff that represents the saint as a companion. Local residents traditionally offer them food, drink or small gifts, a practice known as osettai.

On the Kii Peninsula south of Osaka, the Kumano Kodo trails link a group of shrines that have drawn pilgrims for more than a thousand years, from emperors to farmers. In 2004 UNESCO listed them, along with other sacred sites in the Kii Mountains, as a World Heritage Site. The Kumano Kodo is one of only two pilgrimage routes on the UNESCO list, the other being the Camino de Santiago, and walkers who complete both can claim a dual pilgrim certificate.

Here is a side-track that says something about how a single place can hold several meanings. Mount Kailash in western Tibet is sacred to Hindus, who see it as the home of Shiva; to Buddhists, who associate it with the deity Chakrasamvara; to Jains, for whom it is where the first tirthankara attained liberation; and to followers of Bön, Tibet’s pre-Buddhist religion. The circuit around it is about 52 kilometres. Hindus, Buddhists and Jains walk it clockwise. Bön pilgrims walk it the other way. On the narrow path over the Dolma La pass, at over 5,600 metres, the two streams meet head-on.

The history of pilgrimage also includes journeys borrowed for politics. In March 1930 Mahatma Gandhi set out with 78 followers from his ashram near Ahmedabad and walked for 24 days to the coast at Dandi, where he picked up a lump of natural salt in defiance of British law. The march drew thousands of supporters along the way and is remembered as a turning point in the Indian independence movement. In August 1963 about 250,000 people travelled to Washington for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech.

Other trips are about grief. War cemeteries on the Western Front and at Gallipoli receive descendants of the soldiers buried there, and the dawn service at Gallipoli on Anzac Day, 25 April, draws visitors from Australia and New Zealand every year. Some of the most frequented secular sites are linked with music and fame: Graceland, Elvis Presley’s home in Memphis, opened to the public in 1982, and the zebra crossing outside Abbey Road Studios in London is crowded with visitors recreating a famous album cover. Researchers describe these as secular pilgrimages, noting that they often share the same patterns as religious ones: preparation, a ritual at the destination and a souvenir carried home.

Much of the modern chapter in the history of pilgrimage is about walking. People who would not describe themselves as religious walk the Camino, the Kumano Kodo or the Via Francigena from Canterbury to Rome for reasons that range from grief and illness to a change of job or simple curiosity. Religious festivals remain central too. The processions of Semana Santa in Spain and the December commemoration of Rumi by the Mevlana whirling dervishes of Konya draw both believers and travellers who come to watch.

The practicalities have barely changed in some places. On the Camino, walkers carry a credencial, a pilgrim passport stamped at hostels, churches and cafés along the way, and present it at the Pilgrim’s Office in Santiago as proof of the distance covered. On Shikoku, temple offices still ink and stamp a pilgrim’s book with each temple’s seal and name in calligraphy. Anyone planning one of the long routes should allow for rest days, buy shoes early enough to break them in, and expect the last 100 kilometres before Santiago to be by far the busiest stretch of the whole walk.