ENCourtyards of Vilnius Old City were portrayed in literature in different languages, painted by artists and photographed by photography masters. They are an important locus of a real city, an interesting fragment of its literary definition, an element of the poetics of city space. The current paper analyzes courtyard portrayals of houses remaining from the Baroque period in the Old City center as well as descriptions of labyrinths of the courtyards of Vilnius University. This study is based on the following texts: works of writers Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Czesław Miłosz, Tomas Venclova, artists and art critics Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Vladas Drėma and others. Keywords: Vilnius courtyards, city poetics in literature, city space.