Kalnai ir kalnuoti regionai Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės keliautojų akimis XVI – XVIII a

ENThe goal of this article is to analyse three different aspects in the image of mountains and mountainous regions in the travel writing left by travellers from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and to show how they change in these early travelogues. Firstly, mountains are analyzed through the pragmatic point of view: mountains as a natural part of the changing landscape. These were the most stable types of descriptions that had not changed much during the described period as they were used to record the borders of regions, the location of different towns, and, often, to describe difficult travelling conditions. European scholars state that during the seventeenth century mountains became more attractive from the tourist point of view. The same tendencies could be seen in the mid-seventeenth century travel diaries left by the travellers from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, except that these observations were very sporadic and rare. Mountains were recognized as a pleasant part of a landscape only in the second part of the eighteenth century. While that was happening, the Alps as a mountain range were qualified as an extremely dangerous part of the journey through the whole of the described period: usually the Alps were the last barrier between the traveller and Italy, and that made the journey extremely restless. Nevertheless, the Alps were the main mountain range depicted in travel writing from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.