Good little creatures and their words – I mean the clouds. They make the unsuspecting little doves (they portray the feather) and within them, they have hidden the bitter sting. That was it – which other? – that was it that brought all the trouble. They went through the swamp like swollen buffaloes, spewing, and then they returned deflated and said to the air: “Come, now you have the freedom to take us.”
In 1923, after the Asia Minor Catastrophe, an orphaned boy will find himself as a refugee child in Vertekopi, in today's Skydra. There, he will become close friends with a little Turk, the young Sukri, who will have to follow the reverse journey – although his fate will be even harsher. The wandering of the little hero through cities and villages of Macedonia, where he struggles to survive working sometimes as a street vendor and sometimes as a mudslinger, will test his endurance and teach him the harshness of life firsthand. But his pure soul and sensitivity will never cease to seek that place where children do not work and are always happy.
“... Loundemis wrote as he breathed, he never stopped... Almost every one of his books is a testimony from his long odyssey in places of exile – both inside and outside Greece.” Stratis Tsirkas
“Menelaos Loundemis was one of the beautiful figures of the generation of Romite writers who encapsulated in their work the thirst and struggles of our people for freedom, democracy, and humanity...” Dido Sotiriou
“A symbolic figure of a fighter for life, against injustice, who experienced it in the harshest way and fought against it with childlike stubbornness until the end. His message ‘to fight for what your heart says’ and ‘not to give up’ is the most timely message of our days. A message for both the grown-ups (parents – teachers) but mainly for the children. Who are called to rebuild their colorful world, from the ruins we leave them mainly due to our tolerance towards the most corrupt system for many decades.” Magazine Ek-Paidevo, issue 27, September-October 2012
