Historical Travel Reports from the 17th Seventeenth to the 19th Nineteenth Century

As part of the EU project “Europeana Travel”, selected travel reports from the collection of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) were first digitized by the Regensburg University Library and then subjected to OCR processing. Consequently, not only can the reports be read online, but they can also be searched by keyword. In addition, individual pages or the entire document can be downloaded from the Digital Collections of the IOS..

This collection comprises a selection of more than 50 travel reports from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It covers Russia, including the Caucasus and Siberia, the Habsburg Monarchy (the Hungarian half of the Empire), as well as Southeast Europe, including the Ottoman Empire. Further, there are detailed descriptions of the cities of Bursa, Dorpat (Tartu), Istanbul, Novgorod, Riga, and Saint Petersburg.

The primary aim of digitizing the reports was to make history “tangible”. Through the availability of historical eyewitness reports, the interested reader can gain impressions and acquire information about everyday life, culture, architecture, and landscape, which supplements the knowledge that can be derived from specialist historical literature.