Maurice Leon's house in Thessaloniki

This is the house we moved to in 1930, when I was 12 years old. It was at 55 Italias Street in Thessaloniki. It was a big corner house. This picture was taken in 1947. My sister Zan Cohen, nee Leon, had moved with her family to Montreal, Canada. We took this photo and sent it to her so she?d have a memoir of the house she grew up in. I remember this house very clearly. It had a well in the yard. It had a big entrance hall. There was a big corridor. On the right there were three bedrooms. All my siblings had their own bedroom, apart from my sisters who were sharing bedrooms by two. At the end there was a very small room. On the left was the dining room. There was also the kitchen with a place where we would put the coals and the ice box. There was a wandering merchant selling big blocks of ice. We would buy ice from him and put it in the ice box in order to preserve the food. We knew all our neighbors in this neighborhood. They were all Jews and we had very good relationships. I remember that near our house was the Krispi's bakery where we would buy our bread. Also living in this neighborhood was a family called Petsa and a lady called Mrs. Makri. We were very good neighbors with them, too. As children we would play together with the children living in our neighborhood. There was a big yard near a Romanian school where Romanian children were studying. In this yard we used to play football. A few years ago I went to look for our old house, but they've put an apartment building in its place.