A few years after the incorporation of Thessaly into the Greek state, the professional beggar Tziritokostas, a ruthless exploiter of human weakness, arrives in the village of Nychteremi at the mouth of the Pinios River. With the sole purpose of personal enrichment, Tziritokostas skillfully manipulates the uneducated, superstitious, and primitively instinctive villagers, leading them to destruction and annihilation in just a few days.

Using language that masterfully combines the demotic with the vernacular idiom, Andreas Karkavitsas shatters the "crust" of ethnography and proceeds to a relentless and caustic critique of the Greek society of his time. At the same time, he creates absolutely realistic characters with impressive psychological depth, with Tziritokostas, who alludes to the folk myth of the wandering devil, emerging as one of the most iconic "figures" of modern Greek literature. Ultimately, the author composes the dark fresco of a society on the borders of the "old" and the "new," while with the final triumph of Evil, he disturbingly reminds us of the perpetual agony of human nature.

"The Beggar," the undisputed masterpiece of Karkavitsas, has been read by many generations of Greeks and influenced top subsequent writers. Today, it is considered a classic text of domestic naturalistic (realistic) literature and is ranked among the most important works of our modern prose.