Paved with stones that, according to one Roman writer, “give the appearance not simply of being laid together ... but they seem to have actually grown together,” the Via Egnatia joined East and West under empires both Roman and Ottoman. Much of its 1,100-kilometer length can still be walked and driven, from original-stone footpaths in Albania to a superhighway in Greece.

Independent since 1975, Suriname began as an English and then a Dutch colony. Now among the western hemisphere’s most culturally diverse countries, it also lays claim to the hemisphere’s highest percentage of population identifying as Muslims: 14 percent. Our Canada-born, Amsterdam-based, award-winning illustrator-author paid a visit to sketch and listen.

Stamped with patterns that beautify, identify and aid baking in a clay oven, the flatbreads—non—from the heart of Central Asia make art of one of the world’s most ancient staples.

Good looks and a fleet wit gave Al-Ghazal his name, which means “gazelle,” and in later years the poet and courtier of Córdoba proved a reluctant though dutiful envoy both east and, more notably, north.