The doctoral thesis Oral literature genres and religious - folk culture of Široki Brijeg holds records on the intangible cultural heritage collected through fieldwork, as well as pre-existed oral-literary records in the area of Široki Brijeg. The thesis is thematically divided into ten chapters in which different types of oral literature and traditional customs are separately treated. The work begins with an introduction that explains the topic and structure of the paper followed by the methodological procedures, research objectives and work hypotheses. The second chapter provides brief information on the origin of the name and location of the city whose history can be traced back to the fourth century and Porphyrogenitus' work De administrando imperio or On the management of the empire. In addition, it provides an overview of history of Široki Brijeg, with a special emphasis on the centuries-old Turkish rule, as well as the prosperity of the city, which is inevitably associated with the arrival of the Franciscans in a small village called Čerigaj and their future settlement in Široki Brijeg. The third chapter provides an overview of the terminology used for oral literature. Folklore, folk literature and oral literature stand out as the three most common terms throughout history. The rising awareness of the importance of recording oral literature becomes imperative. Oral literary forms created the basis for what is now referred to as written literature. Special attention is paid to oral traditions whose main feature is the belief in the truth of their content. As an oral literary form, oral traditions live on for centuries by transmission from generation to generation, changing their form and expression at times. The theoretical basis is based on a review of literary, historical and ethnological studies on the genres of tradition to create a general picture of the genres of tradition and their basic characteristics. The content of the stores is mostly related to local events and real places. The protagonists often have names and surnames. Today, oral traditions are mostly divided according to their motives, themes, or their functions, which led to many disagreements between theorists in their classification and terminology in the past period. After the classification and terminological determinants of the oral traditions, they are 379 divided according to Dragić's classification into historical, etiological, eschatological, mythological, demonological traditions and stories from life. Interweaving between different genres of stories isn’t exceptional. The fourth chapter comprises a brief overview of oral-rhetorical forms that have received insufficient attention within oral literature. A partial reason for this is the classification of the oral-rhetorical forms that were classified into other literary forms, without having in mind their specificity and independence. In this text forms are classified into are classified into exorcisms, toasts, chants, tongue-twisters, blessings and curses. Some of the oratorical forms are an integral part of the collected traditional customs. The following chapter deals with the microstructures: sayings and proverbs. Ptahhotep's lessons of wisdom, commonly called The Maxims of Ptahhotep (around 2400 BC), mostly composed of proverbs, is considered to be one of the first books in history. Proverbs also record the sacred books of many nations, such as the Vedas, the Talmud, and the Bible. The opening part discusses efforts to establish and define a proverb, followed by a list of proverbial collectors as well as writers who have incorporated proverbs into their works. Sayings are alphabetically categorized since such a classification is considered the oldest and most practical. The collected proverbs are stylized with folk etymology and due to the wide range of motifs are considered to be an integral part of everyday life. The sixth chapter brings records of the ganga, a traditional polyphonic melody of western Herzegovina. The records are preceded by the clarification of the name and origin of the ganga. Observing the ganga through the prism of Croatian traditional culture brings us to a conclusion that its ubiquity and deep connection with all annual and life customs is noticeable. From a wide range of gangas, only those that have passed the elimination system are recorded, since only those that are considered the most suitable for performance according to multiple criteria remain in the people's memory. For the purposes of the work, they are divided according to the most common topics they deal with, especially about t girlhood, love and love affairs, sadness, faith, patriotism, then funny poems and gangas about themselves. The following chapter brings a detailed overview of traditional customs that are deeply rooted in the traditional culture of Croats. The customs in Herzegovina are an essential element of people's identity. The general classification of customs includes life or family customs, annual and calendar, and work or economic customs. The types of customs are regularly intertwined and inseparable from the Catholic faith. Annual events in the cultural tradition of 380 the region of Široki Brijeg are associated with the biggest Catholic holidays such as Christmas, Easter, the feast of St. John the Baptist, St. Elijah, the Savior, the Assumption, St. Thomas, include rites and rituals that carry apotropaic and panspermic elements. Apotropaic and panspermic elements are imbued with pre-Christian mythical properties on which the Croatians inherited through history, but also Christianized over time. The objects of the rites are also performed during the Christian feasts. Their usage is to drive away demonic forces and spreading evil, as well as bringing a fruitful future. The Catholic holidays are associated with various prophecies about the coming year. A special kind is love divination that predicted, mostly to the women, about their future husband and marriage. The eighth chapter presents and interprets wedding customs as the most common and most significant life custom. The wedding ceremony is preceded by a series of stages that had to be obeyed. The wedding was preceded by the custom of going to a folk celebration, called dernek, which provided an ideal basis for expressing sympathy between a young man and a young woman, called zamiračina. After a young man and a young woman expressed their sympathy for each other, it was obligatory to go to sijelo. which was considered an ideal basis for getting to know the young man and the young woman more closely, which could have resulted in marriage. If a young man and a young woman expressed their love and desire to live together, a contract and a request would follow, as well as a ringing as a precondition for a proclamation in the church, which could be followed by a wedding. Special attention is paid to wedding roles that required special engagement and timely involvement in the usual process within the wedding celebration. Irregular marriage customs are also included in the paper, as a position of wedding customs in a contemporary context. The paper ends with a conclusion, a list of references, online sources as well as a list of the narrators.