[6] Starting as a poetic vision it develops into a political-historical drama that expands into a wreath of epic depictions of Montenegrin life, including feasts, gatherings, customs, beliefs, and the struggle to survive the Ottoman oppression.

[7] The poem is constructed around a single, allegedly historical event, that took place on a particular Christmas Day in the early 18th century, during Metropolitan Danilo's rule: the mass execution of Montenegrins who had converted to Islam, known as "The Inquisition of the Turkicized" (Истрага Потурица or Istraga Poturica).

The fact that Njegoš used this event only as a general framework, without bothering about the exact historical data, underscores his concern with an issue that preoccupied him throughout his entire life and which was in line with Romantic thought: the struggle against Ottoman domination.

The characters fight to correct a local flaw in their society – the presence of turncoats whose allegiance is to a foreign power bent on conquest – but they are at the same time involved in a struggle between good and evil.

[8] The main themes of "The Mountain Wreath" can be divided into three interlaced categories:[9] Employing a decasyllabilic metre, the poem is written in the pure language of Serbian epic folk poetry.

[15] Pavle Rak, a Serb-Slovenian journalist, described the massacre as a "total inversion of the meaning of Christmas celebration that should bring peace from God to the whole world" as Christian values were abandoned for politics.

Regardless of their political agendas, ideological preferences or religious persuasions, every new generation of South Slav historians and politicians appropriates Njegoš's work hoping to find enough quotations to validate their own views.

[6] Timothy Winter, a leading British Muslim convert and scholar of Islam, maintains a view that The Mountain Wreath draws on ancient, violently Islamophobic sentiments.

[18] Michael Sells, an American professor of Islamic History and Literature of Serbian descent, shares a similar view, stating that the poem, a required reading in all schools in pre-war Yugoslavia, is notable for its celebration of ethnic cleansing.

In his view, it "denotes Slavic Muslims as Christ-Killers, and plays a significant role in ethnic conflict and Bosnian War of the 1990s", pointing out that The Mountain Wreath is memorized and quoted by radical Serb nationalists of the 1990s.

However, The Mountain Wreath does speak volumes about political, social, cultural and economic conditions in Montenegro during the early 19th century, and about Njegoš's efforts to advocate the ideas of pan-Slavism and the Illyrian Movement.