Tag #119469 - Interview #78782 (deniz nahmias)

Starting from my mother: my mother's family owned a flourmill; it was a very rich family. My grandfather, my mother's father whose name was Isaac - Matathias Beza had a flourmill and he was a rich, well respected man back in the late 1800s. He owned a flourmill that used to grind wheat. He was very wealthy. He was born in Thessaloniki [in 1867] and also died there, in 1936 at the age of 69. In this city at that time two families owned the flourmills: the Beza family and the Allatini family [1]. My maternal grandfather had five brothers but we never met them.

At some point the flourmill he owned was burned down. Maybe it was his competitors who set it on fire. This happened when my grandfather was still young. It had nothing to do with the fire of 1917 [2]; it happened much earlier. The competitors gave to my grandfather compensation on the condition that he'd never rebuild the flourmill, because they had always the fear that the brothers might unite and rebuild it some day. So the competitors agreed to give them a certain amount of money for the next five years. And the flourmill stopped working.