1790 Turku. After Katarina Thorwöst becomes a widow, there are many suitors, but her heart belongs to the fencing teacher lieutenant Carl-Magnus Schildt.

A group of young university students on a sailing trip anchor their boat off the coast of a remote island. They meet the island's owner and his daughter. One of the young men decides to stay on the island for the whole summer and ends up uncovering its dark secret.

Detective Karisto releases Auno 'Räpsy' Pirilä from prison, who in turn has to calve his childhood friend Börje from criminal activities. Alcoholic Dolly takes Räpsy to live in Kallio, Helsinki, and hopes to move to Paris with her in the spring.

After many mishaps, City Engineer Volmari arrives at the masquerade ball wearing a suit of knight's armor from the museum. He dances with his blind date crush Raili until Bertha, the black singer from the circus, pulls him away and a new whirlwind of misunderstandings begins.

Vuokko takes shelter from a thunderstorm in a fishing hut and meets a mysterious man whom she suspects is the smuggler Rompan Eetu. Instead of reporting him, Vuokko decides to follow him to Helsinki to the smugglers' hideout on the condition that he agrees to turn himself and his comrades in to the police.

The boisterous good humor of Jurmala, the nickel-mine owner, is, if anything, only barely dented by the raging battles in Finland before, during and after World War Two. In fact, everywhere he goes, he meets prospective customers on all sides of the conflict with his all-inclusive greeting "Friends, Comrades." Indeed, the resource he is wrenching from the earth's bowels is necessary to all forms of industrial activity, and is especially necessary for military applications. Thus, he has no reason to fear that he will ever run out of customers. This doesn't prevent him from using every possible means to entice them. At home, his relationship with his wife is not so prosperous, and they resort to some extraordinary means to try and keep on an even keel.

Writer and psychiatrist Oscar Parland (1912-1997) narrates this nostalgic story about his early childhood memories and fantasies. Five-year-old Riki spends the summer of 1917 at his cosmopolitan family's summer house by the Gulf of Finland. Surrounded by other children and eccentric adults who speak Swedish, German and Russian, Riki also encounters some fantastic animal characters no one else is able to see.

Lieutenant Takala meets his fellow partisans of 20th division many year after the war. With flashbacks we see the events of summer 1944.