Tag #127804 - Interview #97497 (Sami Schilton)

My father, Robert David Schilton was born in Bursa.  He was a good and kind-hearted man.  He was quite talkative and had a very modern mentality.  He was a serious man.  He had a lot of friends and he liked his friends very much.  They were very intimate, and the same with his neighbors, too.  They were all like brothers and sisters, I remember quite well.  My father studied until secondary school.  He studied at the Alliance Israelite Universelle [2] school in Bursa.  After he finished secondary school [8 classes] he started to work.  My father did not do military service because he was a foreigner, he had a foreign citizenship.  His mother tongue was Judeo-Spanish.  He also spoke Turkish and French.  With my mother and his parents however, he used to speak in Judeo-spanish.  My father’s business was very good in Bursa.  They lived there for many years.  He used to be in the insurance business.  The reason they came to Istanbul was the war.  During the war they had problems with the Greeks and they had to run away.  They came to Istanbul in a hurry to escape the Greeks.  They came to Istanbul to live more comfortably.  I was about one year old at the time.  They did not have a home when they came to Istanbul and they went to live with my mother’s family.  They lived with them for 2 years.  When they came to Istanbul, their economic situation was average.  My father worked at a bank in Istanbul, in the insurance department.  The bank’s name was “Banque Francaise des Pays d’Orient” [the French Bank of Oriental Countries].  It used to be located in Karakoy [a district in the European side of Istanbul] at that time.  He worked there for many years.