This musical drama sweeps through a turbulent 40 years in popular singer Marika's (Sotiria Leonardou) life – and in the history of Greece – starting with the singer's birth in Smyrna, Turkey in 1917. Marika was deported to Greece along with all the other Greeks in Smyrna when she was seven years old, and a few years later, her parents started a career as a musician and a singer in a nightclub/bar. In the short space of one decade, Marika witnesses her father murder her mother, runs away from home, has a baby, and comes back to the nightclub to sing in an act with a childhood friend, Yorgos and a bouzouki player, Babis. Success finally comes at the expense of the suicide of another female singer at the club (named Rosa), but then Yorgos is exiled for political reasons, and she and Babis leave for other venues. Although Marika carries a torch for Babis, their relationship never seems to work out, and after many years and World War II go by, she sends her daughter away to a convent school (to later become a dancer in a cabaret, much to Marika's chagrin) and goes on a tour in America. She then returns to Greece to find herself supplanted by a younger singer named Matina who has caught the attention of Babis. Near the end of the movie, she is stabbed in the stomach the night of her reunion concert. Marika dies of her wounds and is buried by the people she sang with as they sing in her memory at the cemetery.