Mico Alvo and Danny Alvo

This is a picture of my brother, Danny, and myself in the garden of our house. The house was at the corner of Kritis and Papakyriazi Street.

My father built it in 1922, before he got married, together with his brother. They built it together. When he bought the land there, it was regarded as countryside, it was the countryside area.

There were very few houses. When he built his house, there was only one more house on the same street.

The plot was 900 square meters, of which the house occupied 200. It was on the corner of the two streets and the rest of the plot was a garden.

When we were around ten years old, our life was in the garden. There was a basement in the garden, quite big, where the gardener used to store his tools and the pots that he didn’t want to leave out for the whole of the winter.

We had taken this place and had turned it into our own spot, like our room, and we had put boxes, and on top of them newspapers and pillows.

And mother shouted at us, because we had taken the pillows and had transformed the basement to a small house.

My cousin Renee used to come down, from the first floor and we would take the gardener’s trolley and play around. We played girls and boys together.

We had great relations with Danny. Up to the age of 7 years old we used to fight a lot. We would beat each other up. The funny thing was that our mother would come and she would never asked whose fault it was.

She would just slap both of us and that would be it. After that age, we had a great relation between us. We didn't even exchange one bad word with each other.

Not even for economic issues or anything like that at all. Our relationship was equal.

Grandfather used to tell Danny, "you should respect your older brother", thinking the way they used to think at his time. Even though we only had one year difference!

Photos from this interviewee