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Updated: May 19, 2025
Balata, situated on the Golden Horn, is mostly inhabited by Jews of the poorer classes, who make their livelihood as tinsmiths, tinkers, and hawkers. Here, in the early days when the Janissaries flourished, there lived a certain tinsmith called Kalaidji Avram.
Avram would invariably reply: "I have my children to feed and I must work; and without smoke I cannot earn their daily bread." The Janissary, much annoyed, cultivated a dislike for Avram and a thirst for revenge.
In the grand square were two columns a la Vicentina, covered with lamps. One side of the square was illuminated with the word Wucics, and the other with the word Avram in colossal letters. At a later period of the evening the downs were covered with fires roasting innumerable sheep and oxen, a custom which seems in all countries to accompany popular rejoicing.
Having rather an extensive business, his neighbors, especially those who lived nearest, were always complaining of the annoying smoke and disagreeable odor of ammonia which he used in tinning his pots and pans. Opposite Avram's place the village guard-house was situated, and the chief, a Janissary, often had disputes with Avram about the smoke.
The Janissary handed him the fifty-five thousand piasters, and at the same time said: "Of these fifty-five thousand piasters, thirty thousand must be given to the widow and children of Avram, and I advise you to give it willingly, for Avram has taken your place." A Jewish merchant was in the habit of borrowing, and sometimes of lending money to an Armenian merchant of Cairo.
The Janissary immediately bethought him of Avram, the tinsmith, and accused him as his informant, and the Chacham, satisfied, paid the sum and departed. Avram disappeared nobody knew where. The Chacham said that death had taken him for his own as a punishment for stopping him while on a journey. The accomplice of the Janissary came a few days later for his share of the money.
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