Kyra Frossini is a historical poem based on real events, which took place in 1801 in the city of Ioannina in Greece, when the country was still under Otttoman rule. It is a great drama with all the elements for a great opera: love, passion, betrayal, repentance, and murder. The last of plays in verse by poet-authors of the Ionian Islands and Crete since the 17th century, the poem is written in the more simple oral form of vernacular Greek. This marks a break both with local Greek and with the erudite tradition of writing in a form of archaic, or purist language, written but not really spoken at the time except in academic and official rhetoric. Deeply rooted in folklore, the characters of the story participate in a sequence of profoundly grim events, with good and evil incessantly alternating.