While many Greeks use the term yussuroum when referring to a flea market, few know that it stems from this family and, in particular, from the antique market it created in the Jewish quarter of central Athens. Mois Yussuroum is the descendant of a long line of successful merchants with a presence in Athens. The Yussuroum home on Karaiskaki and Ermou streets was located in the middle of the city center’s commercial district and also housed the capital’s first synagogue. This was the heart of the Jewish quarter, which lay between Aghion Asomaton Square, Sarri and Ermou streets. While the older traces of the Yussuroum family tree are lost in time, like many Sephardic Jewish families in Greece they came from Spain after being expelled by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. The Yussuroums initially settled in Smyrna (now Izmir) as the Ottoman Empire had opened its gates to the Jews. The significant contribution of the Jewish presence in the Ottoman Empire and in the countries that emerged from its gradual dissolution stems mainly from that wave of eastwards emigration from the Iberian peninsula in the late 15th century.

When the Greek state was created, in the 19th century, one of the Yussuroums, Isaak, moved to Chios in 1830, when the island was still under Ottoman rule. The family moved to the island of Kythnos in 1860 and Isaak’s son, Bohor, a tailor by profession, later decided to move to the capital of the Kingdom of Greece, settling in Athens in 1863. Bohor, Mois’s grandfather, opened a clothing store on the corner of Karaiskaki and Ermou streets. “My grandfather was a tailor but people didn’t have a lot of money at the time and they bought second-hand clothes,” said Mois. “He’d alter used clothes and display his goods every Sunday at Avyssinias Square, at the bazaar. Everyone else was selling antiques, which is why the phrase ‘going to Yussuroum’ became so prevalent.” Bohor had seven children in Athens. After his death in 1887, his eldest son, Ilias, expanded the business and became a pillar of the Athens Jewish community. Ilias’s younger brother, Noah, Mois’s father, married Mazaltov Habib, an Athenian Jew, and tried to avail of the many opportunities that opened up in Greece after the Balkan Wars. He moved to Thessaloniki, where he opened a hospital supplies firm with Abraham Nahimas, but the massive fire in 1917 that wiped out almost the entire Jewish quarter in that city scuppered his plans and forced him to move back to Ermou street in Athens, though to number 84.