Manuscript of Smajil O. Bradarić's collection of folk ballads Folk Art and Wisdom (from Derventa and the Surrounding Villages Mostly)

This handwritten collection of oral poetry contains almost one thousand lyric ballads and a number of lyric narrative songs. They were all gathered and written down in five books by Smajil O. Bradarić, a religious teacher from Derventa, who collected them mostly in the north and northwest of Bosnia in the 1930s and 1940s. 

In terms of the volume and poetic value of the songs, this collection is equal to the famous collection compiled by Ludvík Kuba, whose manuscript is also stored in the Folklore Archive of the National Museum. However, unlike Kuba's collection, which contains musical notation, Bradarić's contains lyrics only. Also, while Bradarić records all variants of a song as a single entry, Kuba registers them as separate songs, which increases the total number of entries. The Folklore Archive of the National Museum holds a number of similar collections, such as those compiled by Muhamed Hadžijahić, Stevo Kukić, and others.