As a love story, the plot starts from afar. The Transylvanian Reformed theologian, the talented Pál Simándy, returns home from Utrecht to Cluj with excellent credentials, but with a broken heart. He asks the Reformed bishop to be the priest of the beggars, the support of the abandoned, the comforter of the suffering. This is how he came to Magyargarabó, to the former church of Péter Bod, among the mountains of Görgény, to be the final valiant fortress of Hungarian survival in this wretched mountain village.

However, Simándy not only has to deal with poverty, superstitions, and ignorance, but also with the violently expanding local representative of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Pope Todorescu.

The duel between languages, cultures and denominations takes an unexpected turn when Simándy falls madly in love with the Romanian priest's daughter, Florica. The episodes of their initially hopeless love are stops on the way to a terrible tragedy, culminating in which the pastor discovers that the girl's father is an agent of the Romanian irredentist center in Bucharest...
The grippingly exciting, more dramatic episode after episode, passionately orchestrated and multifaceted novel is the story of a hero who deeply experiences the catastrophic fate of the nation in his emotional life.