Private Peter Rados of the 3rd Battalion died the same day as John Simpson Kirkpatrick – the man with the donkey – as Turks attacked the Anzac line at Gallipoli. That June, a letter was sent to his parents. No doubt it read the way so many others did: ‘I regret to inform you . . . Your son was Killed in Action . . . He was buried by his comrades in a grave beside the sea.’1

But the letter never reached his family.

Some months later, an officer attached to AIF Headquarters in London jotted down a memo to the Secretary for External Affairs in Melbourne. The standard letter had been sent to the next-of-kin recorded on this soldier’s attestation papers. It was returned by the postal authorities some time later, marked with a blunt finality: ‘Not Known.’

There was nothing so unusual in that. Families often travelled in search of work and some next-of-kin proved difficult to find, especially in remote parts of Australia. On some occasions the news of the death of a loved one was relayed from one forwarding address to another. Parents sometimes chanced across their son’s name in a casualty list published by the major dailies long before they heard anything from the authorities. We can only imagine their horror as that print stared back from a morning paper.

But the route this particular file had travelled was even more circuitous. News of Peter Rados’ death travelled by telex or ship from Gallipoli to Egypt, on to Britain, then back to the Mediterranean. Private Rados, it appears, had changed his identity to serve with Australian Forces. His real name was Santelis Pannagioty, a Greek veteran of the Balkan wars (from which he sported a scar on his chest) but keen to fight a second time. And his mother, father, and four sisters lived not in Athens – as his recruitment papers claimed – but in Smyrna (now Izmir) on the Aegean coast of Turkey.

Private Rados also had a brother. Like Peter, Nick Rados had emigrated from Greece, both men had adopted the same anglicised surname, both had crossed the ocean to build new lives for themselves. As late as 1918, Nick knew nothing of his brother’s fate. Just a few weeks before the war ended, he wrote to the Red Cross from Atlantic City, New Jersey:

My brother . . . has not been heard of since he enlisted at Sidney [sic] Australia during the early part of the war. Kindly write any information you know of him. His mother and brother are very anxious [to learn] his whereabouts.2

Nick explained why his brother had kept his identity a secret:

Pvt P. Rados gave his parents address as Athens so that it would not interfere with his enlisting as his people were living under Turkish rule and [he] himself was a Turkish subject.3

Santelis Pannagioty’s parents never found out what became of their son. Both died before the war ended. As did at least three million other Ottoman civilians: victims of famine, disease, an Allied blockade that starved Turkish cities, the forced relocations of ethnic minorities, and genocide.

Private Rados was survived by four sisters, Marika aged 15, Atho aged 13, Smaro aged 11 and Georgina, the youngest, barely 10. Nick pleaded for any help Australia might offer them. His sisters were stranded in Erdik, a territory of Turkey ceded to the Allies, and he feared for their fate, as he had for that of his brother:

They are in very poor condition, as they have lost all during the war. You will be doing a great act of charity if you will go to their assistance . . . And what the late Private P. Rados left should be given to them.4

In very poor condition: Private Rados’s brother struggles to reunite a family torn asunder by the fighting. Note the attempt to recruit the aid of the American ambassador. Nick Rados appealed to his adopted country for assistance – just as he hoped for help from Australia. America was no longer neutral by 1918, entering the war on the side of the Allies. None of these entreaties were successful. NAA: B2455, RADOS PETER courtesy National Archives of Australia.

The authorities never found Private Rados’ sisters. Nor is there any evidence they searched for them. The protocols of the day defined the next-of-kin as the eldest male relative. Four sisters, living under Turkish rule, were really of little interest to them, and given the chaotic state of Turkey in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, it is unlikely that any inquiries would have been successful.

In 1921, Peter Rados’ personal effects were sealed and mailed off to his brother in America, along with a commemorative medallion, a letter from the King, and a sketch of the cemetery where the Greek-Australian lay buried. Base Records, Melbourne, noted ‘the gallant service rendered by Pte. Rados’. And perhaps, as the form letter was typed, someone noticed his service number. Rados had been one of the first to enlist and had died in the first month of the Gallipoli campaign.5

The cemetery where a Greek-Australian lay buried: Michael Manoussakis kneels by the grave of Peter Rados at Ari Burnu Cemetery in Gallipoli. Michael ‘adopted’ Rados’ grave in a government sponsored study tour of Turkey. His own family had emigrated to Australia in the 1950s and he met his great aunt for the first time at an airport hotel in Athens. Waves of migration followed the Second World War as they did the First. Generations later, its effects are still felt by Greek, Turkish and Australian families. Courtesy Bruce Scates.

Directly and indirectly, ‘the hardships of . . . war’ had claimed his life, that of his parents, and quite probably his four young sisters. In 1923, after another Greco-Turkish war, Greece and Turkey agreed to population exchanges that would tear families and communities apart, depopulate towns and cities, and leave a legacy of bitterness and confusion. The hardships of the Rados family were shared by many.6

Sources and further reading: This story draws on Peter Rados’ service dossier NAA:B2455 RADOS PETER; and his immigration records NAA: A1 1914/15312. The authors gratefully acknowledge Michael Manoussakis for his assistance in bringing these records to light. One of the best and most recent books on the dispersal of the Greek diaspora and the rise of Greek and Turkish nationalism is by Nicolas Doumanis, Before the Nation, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and for the debate surrounding the Armenians, see Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

1 No copy of the letter survives, though it is referred to in NAA: B2455, RADOS PETER.

2 N. Rados to Red Cross, 28 September 1918, ibid.

3 N. Rados to Australian Imperial Force, 29 January 1919, ibid.

4 N. Rados to Australian Imperial Force, 30 May 1919, ibid.

5 Base Records to N. Rados, 8 March 1921, ibid.

6 N. Rados to Australian Imperial Force, 30 May 1919, ibid.