Yiannis Kalpouzos, a leading writer of his generation, masterfully captures the soul of Pontic Hellenism. In anticipation of the deportation of Armenians from Trabzon in June 1915, a girl who seems to have been painted by God himself takes refuge in the house of a stranger. In Ordu, another girl from a wealthy Greek family prepares for her wedding and struggles to envision the future with a man she barely knows. The charismatic, devout, and guardian of the morals of the time, Galinos Filonidis, is torn between two women; he is tested against his ideas; he faces brutality and hatred; he is crushed and sets as his life's goal to avenge the one who caused him great pain. In the background of the narrative, Pontus is sketched until the population exchange; the homogenization of races with religion as both a connecting link and an alibi; the fear, intolerance, and nationalism sown by the Young Turks and later the Kemalists; daily life in the early years of the Soviet Union; the persecution of Greeks under Stalin; the labor camps in Siberia and the steppes of Kazakhstan with unbearable heat in the summer and severe cold in the winter; the desires, passions, and sufferings of the Pontians. And all, through the multifaceted journey that life writes and the journey written for life, seem like flames and movements of the Pontic dance Serra, the dance of fire.