The twenty-five-year-old diplomat Ion Dragoumis arrives in November 1902 at the Monastery in Ottoman-occupied Macedonia. Besides his official duties at the consulate, he soon comes up with the idea of fulfilling a mission and decides to take action. He establishes the "Defense," strengthening and illuminating the Greek communities against Bulgarian terrorism. He leaves behind his beloved Attica and two past romances, while in Monastery he will connect with teacher Sapfo Theiou.

In the diary entries of his Notebooks, he records events and meetings, unparalleled travel impressions, ethnological and ethnographic notes in the style of great explorers, descriptions of official conflicts, hopes and chimeras, disappointments, sorrows, and upheavals, philosophical and ideological reflections leave their mark.

The route: Athens-Monastery-Serres-Pyrgos-Philippopolis and the major military drills in Thebes, where he participates. A key point: the death of Pavlos Melas in Macedonia.

Dragoumis, a unique stylist, with profound intellectual depth, possessing a solid and effortless speech, a passionate demoticist, with smooth and balanced Greek, without extremities or pompous linguistic constructions, poetic, lyrical, romantic, sentimental, naturalist, and often ironic, contemplates, ponders, self-analyzes, torments himself, bleeds, revolts, and strengthens himself, confesses, narcissizes, self-denies, and self-sabotages, loves, hymns, and laments, despairing over human destiny, and accepts it.

What else does a writer do? Takes notes for his future books, hopes for generous and merciful times when he will be "allowed" to write without distraction. Such encounters are found here, as well as in all of Dragoumis's Notebooks, published and unpublished.