The most crucial part of this volume includes 247 Serbian, Slovenian and Croatian songs and melodies. The most important are 42 texts collected by Kolberg during his stay in this area in 1857. At that time, melodies of southern Slavs were scarcely collected. Thus, Kolberg’s material is one of the earliest documentation of the musical folklore of Slovenia and Croatia.

The remaining song were taken from printed works, which are difficult to get and not very known even in today’s Yugoslavia. There are 11 texts of songs collected in the years 1828-1829 by A. Kucharski, a Polish slavist and philologist, which are particularly valuable regarding their origin and age. 

Another thing which is worth mentioning is a collection of 500 Slovenian proverbs which survived not only in the Kolberg’s archive, but also in the Jagiellonian Library. The collection which was published before in 1832 in a periodical in Ljubljana, unavailable in Poland, came into possession of Kolberg from the research material of Emil Kortyka, a Polish political exile and one of the first researchers of Slovenian culture. Kolberg was explicitly interested in this person and his legacy, what is discussed in the introduction to this volume.

The vast amount of reference entries related to the territory of former Yugoslavia confirms Kolberg keen interest in Slavic culture, and general trends which were present in Polish science and culture of the 19th century. The field notes are supplemented with Kolberg’s articles related to life and musical culture of southern Slavs. This allows the better interpretation of material included in this volume and confirms Kolberg’s contribution to the popularization of history of Slavic music in Poland.