Beginnings of Holy Mountain as a Place of Pilgrimage

This thesis attends to the Holy Mountain - a place of pilgrimage, mainly to its origins. We can observe the process of an ordinary and uninteresting place becoming the most well- known place of pilgrimage consecrated to the Virgin Mary in Bohemia. At first we go in for general overview of places of pilgrimage that will help us become more familiar with this broad issue, we mention e.g. locations of places of pilgrimage and pilgrims' motivation. Later we focus on the Holy Mountain. We follow its becoming a famous place of pilgrimage in the first centuries of its existence. We allude to miracles that took place here as well as important personages who had crucial influence on development of this place of pilgrimage. We are concerned with first pilgrims coming here, their motives and by the same token we aim at gradual rebuilding of the chapel and later construction work that led to a formation of a beautiful and monumental complex of buildings. Lastly we briefly go through the 20th century approach towards places of pilgrimage and the literary approach towards them in the last decades