The dissertation “Oral Literature in 17th-19th Century Folk Song Collections from Perast” is envisaged as a multidisciplinary research whose intention is to shed light on an important part of the South Slavic cultural heritage that is insufficiently known to the public. The value of this heritage for several fields of humanities and social sciences, primarily the history of literature and culture, is of exceptional importance. As part of the initial phase of the study, archival research was conducted in the Diocese Archives in Perast, the Science Archives of the Museum and Collection of Baltazar Bogišić of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Cavtat, and in the Archives of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb, where 18 unpublished folk song collections were found that had been created in Perast in the period from late 17th to mid-19th century. These are mixed collections of mostly oral literature, as well as transcripts of verses by anonymous Dubrovnik-Dalmatian and Boka writers of the time. Considering that the first of these collections was created in Perast in 1696, i.e., 120 years before Vuk Karadžić printed Prostonarodna pjesmarica slavenoserbska and thus opened the golden era of the study of South Slavic oral literature, it is clear that this discovery constitutes a valuable material within the oldest layers of South Slavic oral literature, which has so far unfairly escaped the more thorough interest of researchers. The oral literary forms found in the collections include bugarštice, decasyllabic epic poems, ballads, octosyllabic lyric poems, poems of praise, etc. Among these poems, there are those that appear in various variants in the wider area, on the Croatian and Montenegrin coast and hinterland, but also local poems, which cannot be found outside Perast. Apart from the literary-historical aspect, the material is extremely important from the point of view of cultural studies because it is rare evidence of hajduks who played an important role in that region in a certain period, but also as testimony of life, customs, relations with Ottoman Risan and Herceg Novi and relations with Kotor, a city under Venetian influence at the time. In addition to a broader cultural-historical review of the folk culture of the early modern period in Perast, the material offered by the folk song collections was observed as its integral part, with analysis from a genealogical and thematic point of view. As part of the work on the dissertation, multidisciplinary research was performed, which resulted in complete monographic processing of the corpus. In addition to the listed institutions, archival research was also conducted at the State Archives and the University Library in Split, the Historical Archives in Kotor and the Museum of the City of Perast. This research was helpful in the process of identifying the authors of individual manuscripts and supplementing the research with valuable information. In this study, an attempt is made to present the aforementioned rich tradition, so far only rarely and incidentally seen as a whole, in more details. In the first part of the thesis, relevant information is provided about the corpus and access to the material. These are, as it was noted above, manuscripts that have until recently been published only partially, without insight into the integral manuscripts, some of which I have prepared for publication in recent years, together with Adnan Čirgić, a colleague and friend, with others still waiting to be published. We found the manuscripts of the largest part of the corpus in the Diocese Archives in Perast, the Museum and Collection of Baltazar Bogišić in Cavtat, and in the Archives of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb. On the other hand, we reconstructed some collections on the basis of transcripts or partial publications, so the total number of collections that were the subject of our interest was reduced to 18 manuscripts. Additional research was also conducted, supplementing certain details related to the corpus or compilers of the collections, as well as the historical context itself, in the archive department of the Museum of the City of Perast, the Historical Archives in Kotor and the State Archives and University Library in Split. During the research, some details were found that have not been known to science so far, such as the well-founded assumption that as many as three oral literary collections were handwritten by Ivan Antun Nenadić, then that Ivan Kolović’s folk song collection is still preserved, and we managed to reconstruct the important recording work of Jozo Šilopi, previously known only nominally. Recording oral texts – on the basis of graphemes used it can be assumed that they were copied from older, today unknown manuscripts – was the privilege of the representatives of the Perast patrician layer, and apart from being recorders of oral and literary transcripts of Dubrovnik-Dalmatian literature, most copyists were engaged in other oral literature or historiographical work, so an attempt was made to present that work in its entirety, where sufficient biographical data existed. In the second part of the study, the history of research in Boka oral literature is presented and critically commented on, from the first review as of 1868 until today. Perhaps this part of the study can be said to be unusually extensive given the fact that it mostly relates to unpublished material, but this abundant literature actually builds on the partial publication of the corpus by Baltazar Bogišić and to a lesser extent Miroslav Pantić. Therefore, this chapter is divided into sections that reflect the activities of both of them, with an introductory part in which a review is given of the contribution of Srećko Vulović in the discovery, preservation and description of this corpus. In the third part, a brief overview of social, literary and cultural conditions in Perast from the late 17th to mid-19th century is presented, within an effort to shed light on the specific historical position of Perast, its importance as a border post of the Venetian Republic, as well as the role played by hajduks living in and around Perast during the Ottoman–Venetian wars. Furthermore, effort was made to present the special social order of Perast in the early modern period, based on a high degree of communal autonomy and awareness of the aristocratic origin of the twelve original Perast family fraternities. The cultural achievements of that area are reflected upon in a brief overview of the activities of Perast writers, church presentations as a special dramatic form, a note on important holidays, festivities and customs of the community and, finally, a review of Perast carnivals, interpreted here as one of the forms of “state ideological apparatus”. The final, fourth part of the study is focused primarily on the genealogical and thematic features of the corpus. Special attention is paid to the Perast bugarštice, from the question of their naming and origin to questioning the phenomena of war, borders, identity and otherness in them. It is also pointed out that Perast bugarštice can be divided both thematically and stylistically into two repertoires, the first of which consists of poems with mainly medieval, chivalrous themes, similar to ballads in terms of design, while the second repertoire refers to Perast history of the 17th and 18th centuries and has the character of a chronicle and epic. A small subchapter is dedicated to the decasyllabic oral epic, including a model of classification that is again reduced to two parts, poems of Ugrophile and Turkophile provenance, with the remnants of chivalrous epic poetry, as the first section which is not specific to Perast but belongs to Štokavian language area, and another section in which there are poems that refer to famous historical events or personalities from the 17th and 18th centuries. Within this group, again, there is a provisional division into hajduk poems, which belong to the type of epics about outlaws from the authorities and the law, and mostly chronicle poems about historical events, naval and land battles, which correspond to the type of border epics. Along with the model of the predominantly chivalrous representation of the opponents inherited from bugarštice, the Vlachs are extremely negatively characterised in these poems, as non- chivalrous, cruel, treacherous and greedy people. The last part of the fourth chapter is dedicated to oral lyric poetry, within which special attention is paid to Perast poems of praise, as a special form of ordinary lyric poetry, which according to the number of written texts is the dominant oral genre within our corpus. Finally, a reflection is made on other oral lyric genres, with wedding and love lyrics being especially popular, with a somewhat smaller number of records of family and mythological lyrics. Eighteen preserved or reconstructed collections of predominantly oral literary provenance in the small city of Perast are a testimony to the rich heritage of this type of literature on the Montenegrin coast in the early modern period. Their antiquity, but also the strong stamp of the peculiarities of the environment in which they were created or adapted, bring a special value to this corpus by which it is presented as an unavoidable, initial phase for studying South Slavic oral literature.