Inspired by a true story, Rotten Lemons is a heretical novel that deals with the concepts of identity and betrayal in a small Asia Minor community, Mersin of Cilicia. An inmate of the Balıklı nursing home in Istanbul narrates the story of the violent expulsion of Metropolitan Damian Mansour from Mersin in 1905, during which the people of Mersin attack him with all the weapons at their disposal: lemon peels, rotten eggs, and gossip.

The plot is filled with humor, love, and conflicts, as the elders of Mersin manage, in the few months Mansour stays in their town, to deceitfully trick him. With dense and varied language, the story gallops towards Mansour's mysterious disappearance and the twilight of the cosmopolitanism of Asia Minor.