This is a photo of my paternal grandmother, Luna Katalan, taken in Kazanlak in the 1910s. She is wearing a traditional Bulgarian dress.
Luna Katalan, whom I was named after, was the first wife of my grandfather David Katalan. He had a little grocery in the village of Turia near Kazanlak before he settled down in the town of Kazanlak. I have heard that in the beginning he had some business in rose oil trading for a while and then he set up a store. His house had three floors and on holidays the whole family gathered there. With his first wife Luna he had three children: two sons, my father Buko and Gavriel, and one daughter, Solchi. My grandmother fell sick with tuberculosis and died in Vienna in 1920 where she was buried - when my husband and I went to Vienna we tried to find her grave but we couldn't.
Then my grandfather married a Jewish woman from Istanbul whose name was also Luna. They had two children together - Shella and Berto. I don't remember the maiden name of my Turkish grandmother but I remember that she was a very beautiful woman, an aristocrat and she didn't like doing the housework at all. Her sister Fortuna came with her from Tsarigrad [historical Bulgarian name for Istanbul; means the City of the King]. She was a spinster, hunchbacked, but extremely intelligent and she did the housework
Luna Katalan
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