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Photo taken in:ThessalonikiCountry name at time of photo:GreeceCountry name today:Greece
This is a picture of my brother, Danny, and myself in the garden of our house in Thessaloniki. It was taken in the 1920s.
The house was at the corner of Kritis and Papakyriazi Street. My father built it in 1922, before he got married, together with his brother. They built it together. When he bought the land there, it was regarded as countryside, it was a countryside area. There were very few houses there then. When he built his house, there was only one more house on the same street. The land was 900 square meters of which the house occupied 200. It was on the corner of the two streets and the rest of the plot was a garden.
When we were around ten years old, our life was happening in the garden. There was a basement in the garden, quite big, where the gardener used to store his tools and the pots that he didn't want to leave outside during the winter. We kind of took over this place and turned it into our own spot, like our room, and we put boxes there with newspapers and pillows on top of them. And mother was shouting at us, because we had taken the pillows and we had transformed the basement to a small house. My cousin Renée used to come down, from the first floor and we would take the gardener's trolley and play.
Danny and I had a good relationship. Up to the age of seven we used to fight a lot. We would beat each other up. The funny thing was that our mother would come and she never asked whose fault it was, she would just slap both of us and that would be it. After this age we had a great relationship. We didn't even exchange one bad word with each other. Not even with regards to financial issues or anything like that at all. Our relationship was fair. Grandfather used to tell us, thinking the way they used to think to at his time, 'You should respect your older brother.' Even though we only had one year age difference.