Barsky Routes: Bridging Cyprus’ past and present through SMART heritage Tourism

BARKY ROUTES introduces a new model for narrative-based smart heritage tourism by transforming the 18th-century travel account of Vasilij Barsky into a structured Digital Humanities corpus and an exploratory digital prototype. The project aims to reveal the cultural, spatial and environmental knowledge embedded in Barsky’s writings and drawings and adapt it for contemporary audiences and sustainable-tourism priorities. The methodology merges humanities research, multimodal data structuring and user-centred digital design. Barsky’s descriptions, sketches, spatial cues and depictions of rituals and landscapes are segmented, tagged and mapped, allowing his routes and observations to emerge as a coherent interpretive system. These research outputs guide the development of an early-TRL prototype that presents geolocated micro-narratives, drawings, audio elements and thematic filters inspired by his attentive mode of travel. Activities unfold as a continuous process: the consortium builds the integrated corpus and cultural map, translates this material into a lightweight prototype and tests it with communities and visitors in urban, rural, coastal and mountain settings. Associated partners ground the project in real regional contexts and ensure that interpretive choices resonate with diverse audiences.