The cultural context of the Drniš region in the previous publications of Ivan Meštrović's life and work has been treated as no more than a marginal topic in the service of determining the artist's humble origins. Duško Kečkemet devoted himself to a more detailed analysis of Meštrović's family and cultural circles in Drniš, while Zorana Jurić Šabić conducted a detailed analysis of the architectural legacy in Otavice. However, a concise overview of all the cultural aspects of the Drniš region was lacking, which motivated the creation of this doctoral dissertation. After the introductory chapter, the attention is devoted to the analysis of texts from Dalmatian serial publications dating from the first half of the 20th century in which Ivan Meštrović was mentioned. Although there are already extensive bibliographic reviews of materials about Meštrović, a large part of the articles published in the Šibenik newspapers was not included. Apart from the fact that the selected articles complete the bibliographic material, they have provided information about the media image of the artist formed in local newspapers, and also have enabled the detection of social connections between editors, correspondents and Ivan Meštrović himself. Even though these are Šibenik and partly Split newspapers, these two cities, as larger Central Dalmatian cities together with the entire hinterland, form a unique media space in which the same cultural and social circles operate. Basic biographical information about Meštrović's youthful days and the names of the people responsible for making his education possible were already known, but knowledge about their mutual relationships was deepened by reading private correspondence. It was confirmed that the artist remembered the donations he had received, and in his mature years the roles were reversed and the artist himself became a benefactor, whether by taking care of the quality of life of his elderly friends like Šime Grubišić, or giving away his works, as was the case with Nikola Adžija. The extensive fund of works that Nikola Adžija had received from the artist became the basis of today's Drniš City Museum. It is a significant segment of Meštrović's artistic heritage with distinctive native features, therefore a detailed history of the museum, the Ivan Meštrović Collection and the segment of the permanent exhibition where the collection is exhibited have been created. The Catalog of the Collection of Ivan Meštrović also belongs to this chapter. In the second part of the dissertation, all aspects of Ivan Meštrović's artistic creations related to the wider Drniš area are covered. There are chapters about public monuments and smaller collections that his sculptures are a part of, followed by the architectural legacy and finally the literary work – a collection of short stories called Ludi Mile. For the first time, a layered interdisciplinary analysis of narrative texts was carried out, from which autobiographical, historical and ethnographic elements were extracted. By combining various topics and an interdisciplinary combination of different approaches, the dissertation in the first part provides a layered picture of the cultural context of the Drniš region at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and in the second part an analysis of Meštrović's rich artistic heritage, which extends from the Nevoljnik sculpture made in 1903 to of the last bronze casting of St. Ante (1954) made in 2017.