Selected text
I remember the house where they lived after I was born. It was on Koromila Street at the fourth stop of the tram. They were renting it from an Armenian. It was quite a nice house. At the beginning, before the Great Fire [5], everyone lived down in the center of the city.
The Jews were the ones that suffered most from the fire because the area where they were living, from the White Tower [6] all the way to the city center, burned down. My grandmother and grandfather lived much better after the fire, even though it took them a few years to recover.
They used to tell many stories about the fire. First of all, in the way they would keep track of time: they would say, 'two years after the Fire,', or, 'three years before the Fire'. We say B.C. and A.D., back then it was before or after the fire. They regarded the fire as a starting point, or a turning point, because the whole city of Thessaloniki got ruined.
They all gathered in the houses of the few families that lived in an area that wasn't burned. If someone, let's say, had a house with four rooms, the relatives would come and he would put one family in each room. You can imagine how this was, and under what circumstances they had to live.
The Jews were the ones that suffered most from the fire because the area where they were living, from the White Tower [6] all the way to the city center, burned down. My grandmother and grandfather lived much better after the fire, even though it took them a few years to recover.
They used to tell many stories about the fire. First of all, in the way they would keep track of time: they would say, 'two years after the Fire,', or, 'three years before the Fire'. We say B.C. and A.D., back then it was before or after the fire. They regarded the fire as a starting point, or a turning point, because the whole city of Thessaloniki got ruined.
They all gathered in the houses of the few families that lived in an area that wasn't burned. If someone, let's say, had a house with four rooms, the relatives would come and he would put one family in each room. You can imagine how this was, and under what circumstances they had to live.
Period
Interview
Mico Alvo