in Ošlje, Vodopić developed an interest in hunting and botanics. He collected herbs and inquired about their folk names. Vodopić's collection of folk names eventually helped Bogoslav Šulek to compile his dictionary. Vodopić left Ošlje for Konavle to serve as the parish priest in Grudi. At the same time, he served as a teacher in the local school. Vodopić remained in Grudi for twelve years, developing a strong attachment to this region. His interest in folklore and customs made him hang out with the faithful. Vodopić's novel Marija Konavoka (English: Marija of Konavle) was written with a strong local vocabulary of Konavle. His novel is among the first novels written in a dialect, rather than a standardised language. Marija Konavoka, his greatest literal work, was based on a real story he personally testified as a parson in Konavle, where he described life of the people of Konavle before the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary. In 1857, Vodopić was appointed a parish priest in Gruž, where he remained for twenty-two years. This period of his life was the most prolific. Politically, Vodopić supported the People's Party. In this period he became politically involved. Vodopić was a proponent of the political unification of Dalmatia and Bosnia with the rest of Croatia. For most of his life, Vodopić supported Yugoslavism, however, since the 1880s, he became less and less enthusiastic about the idea. His view of Serbs changed since then, mostly because of their cooperation with the Italian nationalist Autonomist Party in Dalmatia. Since 1862, Vodopić worked as a teacher of Croatian for the Municipality of Dubrovnik, and after the school reform of 1870, he taught Croatian in Gruž. While in Gruž, Vodopić wrote Tužna Jela (English: Tearful Jela) i Robinjica (English: The Slavewoman), with the latter novel being inspired by the Herzegovina Uprising. The Dubrovnik magazine published Tužna Jelka in which he described a hard life of sailors, where Jela is a mother of two sons, both of whom died while sailing. He also wrote another tale, called Na Doborskijem razvalinama (The wrecks of Dobor), where he writes about a misadventure of a Christian family and a convert to Islam. In this tale, he wrote how Bosnia's progress is tied to its unification with Croatia. After the Herzegovina uprising started in Herzegovina, where Christians rebelled against the Ottoman Empire, Vodopić wrote a poem titled Robinjica (Slave woman), about a girl