"Moi maika... My mother..." Areti wiped her sweaty forehead, the little one opened her eyelids and looked at her with tearful eyes. "Were you seeing your mother, Vasilka? You were calling her in your sleep..." "I don't remember my mother, I never knew her, how could I see her?" she replied softly, in a mix of Greek and Bulgarian. "I was seeing you..." she continued with trembling lips. "I was seeing you, lady teacher..." At the dawn of the twentieth century, the relentless struggle rages in enslaved Macedonia. The land bleeds, Hellenism is dying. Turks, Bulgarians, committees, arson, executions, countless sacrifices. Women of the small homeland. Teachers, nurses. Like Areti, like Fotini. And tender sprouts, grown with hardship, raised with danger. Like little Vasilka, who never knew her mother, only a handful of years, filled with hunger and persecution, a seven-year-old child swept away by the hardships of the whole world. Like Milio and Anthi, stripped branches in the midst of a wild war, with a burned house and parents lost in the attacks of the komitadjis. Little candles of the small homeland. Scattered leaves on its sacred soil.