In their contemporary meaning and form, idioms express the way man created the world around himself and are therefore linguistic symbols that expose the transformation of objective circumstances and the natural world into that which constitutes the concept of culture. Through each individual component in its structure and through its connotative components, the overall meaning of an idiom demonstrates the way man understands nature and intimate and broader social relationships; how one sees himself and his “Me”, which, moreover, expresses emotion and judgement, and hence man’s relationship with everything that unfolds around him. Taking these facts into account, it can be asserted that the idiom is a linguistic unit that represents the mental and spiritual world of man, and thus the groups of individuals who form one nation, and provides moral guidelines for the whole of society. Such an understanding of idioms allows for the understanding of how culture and language interact through the analysis of their semantics and structural form. The phraseological framework uncovers ancient mythological collective imagery on the structure of the universe, to which man has largely attributed his own characteristics, transmitting how he sees himself and his self-awareness – including how he views parts of his own body – onto objects and phenomena in an objective world. The subject of this research is idioms which include the name of a body part in their compositions, i.e. somatic phrases, in Croatian and Ukrainian. Idioms which include the head, the eye and the hand are subjected to a detailed structural and semantical analysis. Although in general there are many somatic phrases in the phraseological corpus and they have been subject to numerous researches in linguistics, no systematic contrastive analysis of Croatian and Ukrainian somatic idioms has been carried out as of yet. The aim of this research is to compare the chosen corpus of Croatian and Ukrainian idioms in order to determine what is common and what is specific in the semantic and structural organization of the selected units, and so this analysis is of a contrastive character. Taking into account the achievements of contemporary linguistics, which is most developed in the psychocognitive and linguistic cultural context and which is aimed at seeking the essence of the ways and mechanisms of the verbalization of the underlying mental models thus beginning with axioms about the connection between language and culture, a contrastive research allows to best perceive the specificity of expression as a linguistic phenomenon, as well as cultural terms, in the compared languages. The research was carried out on an idiom corpus which was collected from general and phraseological monolingual and bilingual Croatian and Ukrainian dictionaries and from the available Croatian and Ukrainian monographs and doctoral dissertations in which somatic phraseology is the central subject. The idioms are primarily analysed from a semantic point of view, however their structure has been taken into account as well. The second chapter is devoted to defining somatism and somatic phraseology, to presenting the linguistic research which it was the subject of, as well as a description of the main features and certain specifics of idioms with a somatic component. The reasons for the frequency of somatic idioms in the general physiological corpus are also explained. Furthermore, also considered is the fact that a large number of somatic idioms are based on non-verbal communication, gestures and facial expressions, whereby an incomplete desemantization is inferred, this being characteristic to a much greater extent for somatic idioms rather than for other idioms such as polysemy, which is also characteristic for this group of idioms. The third chapter sets forth a representation of symbolic meanings and ancient concepts in the image of the world and of mythology about the human body itself and of its individual parts. The role of the symbolism of somatisms in the formation of the meaning of somatic idioms is also examined. An emphasis is placed on selected body parts – the head, the eye and the hand – which have developed the most symbolic meanings given their nature and functions and therefore get the highest nomination in language; this is best seen in phraseology, since phraseology expresses complex symbolic meanings. The fourth chapter is the central part of this paper and it provides a structurally-semantic analysis of idioms alluding to the eye, the hand and the head in Croatian and in Ukrainian. These somatisms were chosen because of the extremely high number of idioms they belong to. The collected idioms with specific somatisms are divided into semantic groups and are contrastively analysed in two languages; a comparison is made of their similarities and differences at the level of the components present in the overall meaning of the expression as well as of the formal characteristics essential to expressing meaning, which include certain grammatical component categories, or a possible variation in the component composition. The analysis focuses on the meaning and composition of idioms, but also sets forth on the origin and motivation of meanings if they have a significant influence on the meaning of the idioms or on the differences in their usage in the two languages. The idioms’ division into distinct semantic groups allows to see the development of somatic meanings in such a way that each one of the three somatic phenomena originates from the physiological characteristics or functions of the corresponding body part, and the development of the meaning of the somatism itself can be traced through the meaning of the idiom. Such an approach allows for the precise identification of similarities and differences in meanings as well as their development in two languages. After the analysis of the idioms with each of the mentioned somatisms in their composition, there is a brief summary of the results and knowledge on the manner in which the understanding of the human body in a naïve view of the world is embodied in the perception of body parts – in this case, the eye, the head and the hand – and the influence of these notions on the meaning of the idiom. Furthermore, the groups largest in terms of their meaning are presented, and common phenomena at the level of semantics and structure in idioms in both languages are highlighted. Thisresearch has confirmed the premise on the similarity of somatic idiomsin Croatian and in Ukrainian. It was established that in Croatian and Ukrainian there are many forms of the identical or very similar somatic idioms alluding to the head, the eye or the hand which have the same or a very similar meaning in both languages. This is due to the fact that the semantics of somatic idioms are mostly associated with the natural functions that those body parts perform or stem from gestures and facial expressions, which are also often natural bodily reactions; hence, the semantics developed according to both peoples’ identical or very similar understanding of bodily phenomena. In light of this, we can see that the somatic component is not completely desemanticized; rather somatism, as well as its symbolism, in a large number of cases affects the formation of the complete semantics of the idiom. The observation of the semantics of idioms has pointed to the development of the meaning of those very semantics, from the basic, to the transmitted, to the further formation of the meaning of multicomponent language units that they are components of in both languages, in a similar course. Often, transmitted meanings correspond, and only rarely does the course of development of meaning differ completely in the two languages. A large number of analysed idioms have emerged from the description of body parts, gestures or facial expressions, and hence have numerous meanings: the literal meaning of the syntagm that marks the physical movement, followed by the meaning of the idiom, of which there can be many, depending on the metaphorical processes involved. A list of literature and lexicographic sources which the author has listed in alphabetical order and which serves to identify the cited and consulted sources used in the development of this paper is included at the end of the paper. The aim of this research is to contribute to the phraseological research and contrastive phraseology of Croatian and Ukrainian. Since to date there has not been a paper which systematically analyses the somatic phraseology of the mentioned languages, this work also contributes to somatic phraseology in general. In addition, the research carried out provides practical use in teaching Croatian and Ukrainian as foreign languages, as well as in translation.