Brandon Wilson is a author, photographer, travel expert and adventurer. He has walked to the four most important medieval pilgrimage destinations: Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela (via both the Camino Francés and the Vía de la Plata) and Trondheim (Nidaros).

I spoke with Brandon last week. He was in the Italian Alps, where he and his wife finished their most recent adventure: a hike along the Via Alpina, which you can read about in Brandon’s latest book, Over the Top and Back Again: Hiking X the Alps.

That wasn’t the walk we talked about, though. Rather, we discussed Brandon’s Lowell Thomas Award-winning book Along the Templar Trail, and the route he walked from France to Jerusalem—much of it with a Frenchman he calls Émile in the book.

The route runs 4,223 kilometers (2620 miles) through eleven countries: France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Cyprus and Israel.

We talked about the practicalities of the trip, Brandon’s experiences, and his mission to talk to people about peace along the way.

You can download the full interview (length: 36:48 ) on the very intermittent Pilgrim Roads podcast (to which you can now subscribe in iTunes), listen to it on your computer using the player below, and/or read highlights from the conversation below.

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A map of the Templar Trail. Visit the Pilgrim's Tales website for more detailed maps.
Graphic courtesy Brandon Wilson.

When Brandon Wilson set off to walk to Jerusalem, one of his two main aims was to blaze a trail others could follow.

Lots of people walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain, Brandon tells me, and increasing numbers of pilgrims take the Via Francigena to Rome.

And after walking those routes—two of the three most important in medieval times— “A lot of the pilgrims I’ve talked to, say, okay, now what?” Brandon says.

I guess the ultimate in the Triple Crown is to walk to Jerusalem. A few people have walked it over the years, but I wanted to try to establish something that people could follow as a path.

He wanted to give pilgrims a rough itinerary, with stages and accommodation along a single route from Europe to Jerusalem.

The route Brandon and his friend Émile followed passed through the cities that Godfrey de Bouillon travelled through with 40,000 men during the First Crusade.

And this brings us to the second purpose of Brandon’s trek. He followed a route that had been used to wage war, while blazing a trail to spread a message of peace.

“It was a purposeful irony,” he tells me.

I did this not only as a walk to establish a trail, but as a personal peace journey and peace trek to talk to people along the way about the necessity to consciously make the personal effort to choose peace over war. This area in particular has been plagued for centuries, and has been a battleground for many different powers pulling on either end.

And I was met with an incredible response along the way, as I talked to people, ordinary people, working-class people who had seen the effects of war. And the effects had not only been losing family members as recently as during the war in Kosovo, to people who have had their cultures and their societies so disrupted, and have suffered through such a cycle of poverty because war not only drains human lives, but it drains resources from countries.

And did his journey—his talking about peace with so many people—make a difference?

Brandon Wilson.
Photo courtesy Brandon Wilson.

“I like to think so,” Brandon says.

Émile walked with a large medieval pilgrim’s staff, which he decorated with the flags of the countries they passed through. And so, the two of them, as Brandon described it, created “a little bit of a spectacle, and something different. Something you wouldn’t normally see walking down beside the side of a road, these two fellows with backpacks, looking like garden gnomes otherwise.”

Their appearance created opportunities to meet and talk with people, Brandon said.

We had a lot of people coming up to us, and stopping us, and saying, “What are you doing?” And that would give us a chance to tell our story.

And we found the story of our passing preceded us down the road. We would have people driving past and waving to us, or even to the point of pulling off the side of the road and giving us food.

They ended up talking about peace on TV in Bulgaria and Turkey, where their interviews ran for ten or fifteen minutes and reached millions of people.

It’s hard to say how much of an effect the two peace pilgrims had, Brandon says. But their actions could spread.

Every action that we make in life, no matter how small, sometimes affects other people in other instances. It creates something. It’s like a snowball effect or it’s like a droplet in the water. It’s only a tiny droplet, one tiny action, but then that action causes a ripple that spreads and spreads and spreads.

And a lot of times that was a metaphor I saw with what we were hoping to accomplish here. That we were simply two pilgrims out walking and talking to people, but I was hoping that this message, and this establishment of the route would grow to more.

A Vision of the Templar Trail

Photo courtesy Brandon Wilson.

Brandon has heard from a few people he and Émile stayed with along the way. They read Along the Templar Trail and were amazed, Brandon says, because “it ties them all together into this fellowship.”

Many along the route knew it was a path taken by the Crusades. In places like Bulgaria and Serbia, the people are very close to their past, which they remember partly through medieval re-enactments.

In the tradition, of course, it was a path of war. But Brandon wants to change all that.

“Why can’t it be a path of peace? Why can’t it be something that everyday ordinary people from countries all through that area get together and walk side by side like they do on the Camino?” he says.

Can you imagine the power of having a hundred thousand people walking a path, sitting down and sharing meals and stories together, learning that our similarities are greater than our differences, and breaking down those cultural barriers, those religious barriers that politicians and rulers have always set up to set us apart from each other?

There’s a huge potential for human power and the power of the consciousness to change that area. And by simply visualizing peace and working together on that common goal. Of putting one foot in front of another, and stepping and sharing the same trials and tribulations every day. What an incredible difference I think it can make in the long term.

It’s a beautiful dream, but is it likely to happen?

“I think it has everything going for it,” Brandon said.

I think that now more than ever before, we see the necessity for peace and co-operation. And not only avoiding wars, but co-operating on ecological issues, co-operating on issues of human rights and dignity and fair wages and things like that….

In different parts of the world—for example, the European Union—peoples who have been fighting each other are now realizing that times have changed, and it’s now time to join together, Brandon says.

So yes, I think [a peace path to Jerusalem] is possible. It’s going to take a lot of work—and probably more structural wor