Pavao Butorac as a Researcher of Boka’s Oral Literary Heritage

In this paper, the author reflects on some of the research interests of the Perast’s historian, theologian and culturologist Pavao Butorac (1888–1966) related to Boka’s oral literary heritage, i.e., the corpus of predominantly oral literature collections from Perast created in the period from the end of the 17th to the beginning of the 19th century. Although he published numerous works in the period before World War II or immediately after it, Butorac’s most valuable monographs on the history of Boka Kotorska were only published three decades after his death, thanks to the dedicated work of Don Srećko Majić. One of these monographs, the major interdisciplinary study entitled Cultural History of the City of Perast, is precisely the key source for interpreting Butorac’s views on the Boka’s oral literary tradition, since it represents the most significant reference to this literary corpus in the first phase of research into Perast songbooks – from their discovery and first descriptions in the works of Srećko Vulović and Valtazar Bogišić to the mid-20th century, when Miroslav Pantić’s research marked a new phase of studying this corpus.