In the early years of the reign of Manuel I Komnenos, on a deserted coast of Propontis, Stavrakios Kladas remembers his long life. Notarius and copyist himself all his years, having transcribed hundreds of writings of saints and lesser men, he now decides to write his own chronography.
His pen tells his life, a story of adolescent loneliness and manuscripts. a swirl of intellectual dilemmas, persecutions, love and anguish at the dawn of the Komnenos dynasty in the late 11th century. The life of ordinary people during the reign of the Romans, the culture of speech and image, but above all the touch of memory. All the anguish of man in a book, which not only narrates the quest of heavenly kingship, but also mentions the earthly life and the divine soul.
Through its pages, the Byzantine Empire is reflected at the time when the threatening shadows from East and West increase. In the novel, the first reason is not the court conspiracies and the multifaceted battles, but the light from the bulbs of the replicators, that lie above the collars of the saints and the treatises of the letters. Through his pages emerge the consul of the philosophers Michael Psellos, the saint Niketas Stethatos, scholars, monks, hagiographers... But in the center of all lies the verse of an enigmatic poem and a woman, the inner garment of the hero's soul, the garment that substitutes the tortuous robes.
On the soul itself is an internal chronicle of the way a copyist becomes a writer, a novel of family, adventure and freedom, for the other Byzantium. A book about the power of writing and memory, about this momentum that requires us to name the things of the world from the beginning with our own soul.