Victoria Angelova

This is a photograph of my mother Victoria Angelova, nee Elazar, taken in Kyustendil before she moved to Sofia in the early 1920s. On the back of the photo it says that it was taken in 'our courtyard'. I suppose that this courtyard belonged to the house in Kyustendil where my mother used to live before she moved to Sofia.

In my mother's baptismal certificate it is written that she was born on 654, Gradetz Street in March 1906. My mother's parents rented a house there. Not many people had their own houses at that time. The house where my mother was born was somewhere near Hisarlaka [a hill in the central part of the town]. I don't know exactly where the house was situated because my mother's whole family moved to Sofia at the beginning of the 1920s. All her sisters and her brother were very young and most of them started working as shop assistants. They lived on Pirotska Street when they came to Sofia and afterwards they moved into a house on Otetz Paisii Street in the Jewish neighborhood of Iuchbunar. There were many textile merchants and my mother and her sisters managed to start working in their shops.