Salonika—The Allatini Mill

Salonika—The Allatini Mill—The Largest Mill in Macedonia. Published by Jacques Saul—Salonika. Stab. E. B. Giarmolco, Milan. The handwriting on the back is dated 17 July 1918.

Postcard from the book: Jews in Old Postcards and Prints
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The Allatini family originally came from Portugal. In the early sixteenth century, Isaac Allatini served as rabbi at the recently established Lisbon Synagogue in Salonika, but most of the family initially settled in northern Italy, and the Allatinis who played a prominent role in the city’s business and community affairs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were Francos, i.e., they came to Salonika from Livorno. The physician Lazare Allatini (1776–1834) settled in Salonika in 1796, where he married one of the city’s richest heiresses, Anna Morpurgo (1782 or 1783–1867). Of their six surviving children, it was Moïse Allatini (1809–1882) who played the most prominent role, building an immense business empire which was taken over after his death by his son Charles Allatini (?1830–1901) who, in 1888, also created the Bank of Salonika. Both Villa Allatini, where the deposed Sultan Abdul Hamid II was later imprisoned, and the new premises of the family’s flour mill, the first in the city, established in 1857, were designed by Vitaliano Poselli (1838–1918), a Sicilian-born architect who worked in Constantinople before moving to Salonika, where he maintained a private practice as well as working on some of the city’s most important public buildings. In 1911, as conflict engulfed the Balkans and the Jews’ prospects seemed increasingly precarious, the family sold its assets and moved to western Europe. Charles Allatini’s cousin, Sophie Allatini (1868–1943), her nephew Erich Moïse Allatini (1886–1943) and his wife Hélène, née Hirsch-Kahn (1887–1943), were murdered in Auschwitz.