The story of unfortunate lovers from contemporary Belgrade, a young woman married for money, and a student whom she loved before marriage. Juvenile love romance gets extinguished by social intolerance, calculated and upstarted.

Commander Pavle receives partisan Jovan to shot him for not executing his orders. While listening to his unfortunate love story from the war, Pavle remembers his own relationship which had an equally bitter epilogue, and decides to set Jovan free.

Minja, a 19-year-old girl leaves her provincial town after her affair with the professor of drawing in order to avoid the scandal. In the big city, she meets Nenad and changes under the influence of love.

Tugomir, a student, wants to write a dissertation on Love, but fails to complete it before being obligatory drafted in the army. There, he succumbs to paranoia that his girlfriend is cheating on him. He decides to cheat on her too.

Ahmet Nurudin is a dervish and head of the Islamic monastery of the Mevlevi order in Sarajevo. He is a personification of morale and dogmatic belief, everything that Muslim religion of the Ottoman rule rests on. Throughout his life, the atmosphere of the city, the relations with the judge and the mechanism of government, the image of Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century is being revealed. Based on a highly praised novel by Meša Selimović.