The action of this peculiar Bosnian chronicle of the late 19th and early 20th centuries begins at the time when the state executioner Alois Seyfried with Austro-Hungarian force arrives in Sarajevo to expel from there the Ottoman corpse with a turban on his head, and ends when the same the force that turned from a serpent into a gorynych, at the end of the First World War, their heads are cut off and driven back to broken Vienna. The branched, dynamic plot draws the readers' attention to the events that preceded the Austrian occupation, and with its seemingly random impulses reminds of the events that took place after the Second World War. In addition to the main character - the state executioner, drawn from different points of view - the novel, at first glance, as if by chance, casually, tells about the clash of East and West on the stormy Balkan Peninsula. The author, using not at all dry documentary techniques, paints vivid portraits of historical figures.