Tag #127798 - Interview #97497 (Sami Schilton)

The paternal side of my family came to Turkey from Austria and settled in Bursa [a city in the Marmara region of Turkey, close to Istanbul]. My paternal great-grandparents used to live in Vienna.  That is why our surname is written as ‘Schilton’, the same as in German because we came here from Austria.  Our surname is still written in German in our official documents like passports and identity cards.  One of my paternal greatgrandfathers was the Hahambashi [Grand Rabbi] of Vienna and then they gave him the surname of “Deschilton”. Our real surname therefore is Deschilton, a title of nobility that the Austrian government bestowed on my great-grandfather. [Editor’s note: De Schilton may be the Frankofied version of the name that was most probablty von Schilton in the German original.] However, afterwards the family thought it was too much and we did not use that part of our name and only used Schilton.  They used to speak German in Austria and of course did not know Turkish.  The Austrian government gave us Italian citizenship after World War I, in other words they abandoned us.  My great-grandparents were living in Bursa with Austrian passports, but during World War I, the lands where my family members had been born in were conquered by the Italians and that is why we were given the Italian citizenship. [Editor’s note: Probably they lived in those parts of Austria-Hungary that were annexed to Italy after WWI: South Tyrol, Gorz and Gradisca, Istria, Fiume (Rijeka), Zara (Zadar) and some northern Adriatic iselands.] We have had Italian citizenship since then.  That is all the information I have on my paternal side.