At the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties of the 19th century two poets appeared among Croatian travel accounts of certain literary value. They were Grgo Martić, a Franciscan friar from Bosnia who wrote his travels in decasyllabic poems, and the Dalmatian Franciscan Ivan Despot with his accounts in prose. Their works were permeated with romantic views and stylistic characteristics, didactic-educational endeavours and the spirit of the patriotic revival of Gaj's Illyrian Movement. Their appearance in that transitional period from Romanticism to Realism seems anachronistic and out of date, but not conservative and without literary response in their contemporaries. Their travel accounts, especially those of a better structural composition, haven even today literary chram and unavoidable place in literary history — even if evaluated by more rigorous criteria.
