Zotos and Havai, with their tumultuous romantic relationship, an enigmatic boatman, a spider-woman seeking a room for one night and a man for a lifetime, the diabolical quack doctor Margazis, and the adventurer priest Papa-Leras, who boasts of stripping women of their sins and their underwear, get entangled in the carousel that rises to a vile or blessed explosion of stubbornness triggered by a murder, a suicide, the fear of revenge, societal scorn, wealth, poverty, jealousy, desire, some unconfessed crimes, national identity, and the devil or angel hidden within each person. And their lives flow sometimes like a raging river and sometimes like the sweetness of spring.

Main and secondary characters traverse the years of the Italian occupation of Ioannina in 1917; the first attempt to create a Vlach principality in Pindos; the oil extraction in Dragopsa; the campaign in Asia Minor; the refugee crisis of Asia Minor Greeks and Pontians, as well as that of the Turkoyanniotes; the division between Venizelists and anti-Venizelists, and the scourge of banditry in Epirus. At the same time, they follow the footsteps of Jews, Vlachs, Albanians, and Sarakatsani, and generally the turbulent era before 1922 and during the first decade of the Interwar period.

In the same homeland, different worlds, groups, and individuals coexist or clash; dreams merge or part ways, and blood, religions, and languages mix; and everything happens in Ioannina, the city of legends and mystical charm.