Mango family photo selection, annoted by Andrew Mango and arranged in rough chronological order.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
Grandfather Anthony Mango taken in Newcastle, where he would spend time establishing contacts with the coal merchants. The oil painting portrait still in the family possession, below is by an unknown artist and possibly done with this photo as a reference, so in all likelihood done in his absence.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
One of the plates bearing the name of A. Mango from the heyday of family fortunes..
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
Prinkipo (Büyük ada) around 1890s, grandfather second on the left standing, with unknown group, probably local Levantine businessmen, in front of the family summer house on the island. The summer house was eventually sold off around 1942.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
Photo taken in Newcastle where the coal was purchased, grandfather in the middle, and uncle John on the right, man on the left possibly the Newcastle coal dealer.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
On the left Uncle John, on the right uncle Dimitri and grand-mother Evangeline in the middle, elderly man unknown.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
My paternal grand-mother Evangeline née Margariti, that means she came from Margarite which is in Southern Albania. She was born in Istanbul, and her parents probably came from the Epirus region of Greece.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
Uncle John with his wife Blanche née Stavrou from Lemberg whose father was a fez factory owner there, the Eastern region in present day Ukraine under the Hapsburg control. However in 1908 with the Hapsburg annexation of Bosnia Herzegovina a boycott by Turkey of all Austrian products bancrupts the factory overnight. Because the family were partly Greek, Italian and Austro-Hungarian they then moved to Trieste which was then also a part of the Habsburg Empire. Photo taken in a Constantinople photo studio with a fake Alpine backdrop.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
Father aged around 7, early 1890s in a posed photo taken in a Istanbul photographer.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
Father in 1901, aged 17, first or second year in the Leys Public School outside Cambridge, before studying law.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
Examples postcards collected by father in his youth and sent to himself in England during his student years by his English nanny in Istanbul named Ivy Leachman. These postcards are still retained in their album consisting mostly of scenes of Istanbul.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
Pair of political satire postcards also in father’s collection. A depiction of spies being gathered up like dog poo by a tanner, a celebration of the Young Turk coup of 1908. In those days tanners did collect dog droppings from the streets of the cities as it was used as one of the ingredients of tanning.
The Ottoman script reads: ‘Tabaghane tarafından hafiyelerin toplatdırılması’ [The collection of spies by the tanner]
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
Another Young Turk propaganda card of the time: Arab Izzet Pasa who was notorious for taking bribes (in the chancellery of Abdulhamit) escaping to Egypt on a British ship in 1908, clean shaven and dressed in European clothes for the disguise.
Arab Izzet Holo Pasha (1852 Damascus - 1924 Cairo) was a Syrian Turcoman who was a high-statesman in the Ottoman Government, effectively the right-hand man of Abdülhamit II. and oversaw the intelligence group to counter the moves by the Sultan rivals with cunning. He escaped to Brindisi by boat in the 1908 revolution and from there went to Egypt where he later died. His eldest son Muhammet Ali el-Abid became the finance minister of Syria in 1922 and president of that fledgling country between 1932-36 under the continuing French mandate.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
Father, Alexander Mango, taken in London, Lincoln’s inn (one of the 3 inns of law) about 1910, aged 25/26.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
The British Consular court in session probably in the British Embassy (today’s consulate) building during the period after WWI and before the entry of Turkish troops to Istanbul, so probably the Allied occupation period. Father is sitting with his back to us, opposite him are the two magistrates and standing in the corner is the Embassy cavass.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
My mother Ada (Adeleide) née Damonov as a plump girl, probably taken before the revolutionary upheaval in Baku and her flight to Istanbul.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
A tombstone in the Protestant Cemetery, in Athens, Greece, sharing our family name, however I suspect not connected to us. The only Mangos I know of in Russia were Uncle Mathias (who managed the Mango coaling station in Novorossiysk) and his wife a Canadian nurse we knew as ‘Aunt Mac’, who died I think in the late 40s. I met her near St Tropez in 1949 or thereabouts where her daughter, Lucy, who had married a rich Alexandrian Greek had a country house.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
What I call the ‘lost generation’, mother’s cousins in Russia at the time of the revolution, with the military cadet and probably his sister, and they probably died in the chaos of the civil war.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
Büyükada, summer house again, me on the left, aged around 4 and my brother Cyril on the right.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
Me aged around 5.
image courtesy of Andrew Mango
A not too flattering carricature of me done by a Turkish cartoonist done around 2005.