Introduction to the stories

BRUCE SCATES: Welcome back to the 100 Stories. We’re standing in Ari Burnu Cemetery, on the northern edge of Anzac Cove. It’s here on the morning of the 25th of April that the ANZACs landed, part of that ill-fated and poorly conceived Dardanelles campaign. And by late that morning the ANZACs faced murderous fire, murderous fire in the hills above us from this land’s defenders. The Australian and New Zealand troops were, after all, the invaders, and the men they faced here– many peasants and fisherman from this region– weren’t just fighting for the Ottoman Empire, they were fighting for their homeland. Peter Rados was one of hundreds of ANZACs who died in the first bloody weeks of that long and bloody campaign.

He’s buried here, in Ari Burnu Cemetery. But Rados wasn’t really your typical ANZAC. He wasn’t born in Australia as most of the First AIF was. He wasn’t even of British descent. Rados was born in Athens, and his family lived a few hundred miles south of here, in Smyrna– modern day Izmir– on the coast of Turkey. Peter Rados’s story reminds us that the Great War was about the local as much as it was the global– about homelands as well as empires.