One beautiful summer day in 1939, Kassiani peeks behind the curtain of her room at the unknown young man who is slowly drinking his coffee in the yard of their neighbors, unaware that he is the man who will seal her fate. The fifteen-year-old girl feels suffocated in the province, in the shadow of her strict preacher father. The eighteen-year-old Lycurgus, on the other hand, envisions his future at the university in the capital.
The two young people will be united by a teenage kiss and a brutal punishment. They will be separated by his choices and History. In the years that await them, Kassiani will be forced to shoulder burdens that were not meant for her.
Facing a hostile state and a bloodied society, she will often feel that she is being crucified for his mistakes and that the crown he once placed on her head is made of the thorny aspalthus, which they use in her place for fencing or kindling. In the claustrophobic universe of her new world, she will be forced to renounce even her feminine identity, until the day she realizes that such a thing is impossible.
A provincial town from Metaxas' Greece to the post-civil war decade of the '50s. A couple swept away by the storms of the times. A crown made of aspalthus.