Nico and Rosy Saltiel’s wedding

This is a photo from my wedding. The name of the rabbi was Pessah and he was from Veroia. The picture was taken in Thessaloniki in 1957.

Before I met my future wife Rosy I had relationships mostly with Christian girls. In our company it didn't make a difference whether they were Jewish or Christian. But this didn't attract me because to make a proper family with one from another religion was not so… Of course, we had relations with some Jewish girls with whom we went out dancing but innocently, without…And not alone. We were say two or three friends and we had two or three girls with whom we went out dancing. 

There were then some music clubs with orchestras somewhere in the Depot [a neighborhood in the eastern suburb of the city, which took its name from the nearby tram depot], where a lot of people gathered. These were girls of our age. But when I decided to get married I wanted to get a girl younger than me.

At one point when I turned 35 and started to have a better situation financially, I thought it was time for me to stop my bachelor life and to get married and have a family. At that time marriages were fixed. Many people came to the office constantly from Larisa, Volos, from Athens, with girls who wanted to get married. They were exclusively Jewish. And here there were also a few.

Rosy and I got married in 1957. I knew her very well because I knew her family, her mother I knew less. Her father I knew better because our uncle Sam advised him and protected him. And since I knew Rosy, I thought of her. I told my uncle Sam who agreed and spoke with her father and we got engaged. I did make a choice, a sensible choice, as they say.

After the engagement we started going out together. We got married a few months later. It was a regular wedding and ceremony. There were guests. We were so few then. My mother invited many of her friends. For our honeymoon we went to Vienna. We stayed there for more than 25 days. It so happened that one of Rosy's friends married at that time also, so we agreed to go to Vienna together. The four of us spent some time in Vienna together. We had a lovely time, free of cares, very nice.