We Australian Erdogan's may have an Italian brother or sister

We Australian Erdogan’s may have an Italian brother or sister

By Eren Erdogan…….

You know how some stories sit quietly in the back of your mind until one day you feel it’s time to let them out? Well, this is one of those.

It’s about my father, his journey through the Second World War, and the little mysteries that still linger all these years later.

Today, I’d like to share it with you — and I’d love to hear what you think.

My father, Erdogan Hassan Karabardak, served with the British war effort in Italy during the Second World War, and I’d like to share the story behind this old photograph. Some may find it romantic, others bittersweet. But to us—his children—it has always carried a quiet weight. A mystery wrapped in a soldier’s silence.

Dad was born in Polis-Paphos, a small coastal town where the land rolled gently toward the Mediterranean and the seasons were marked by the scent of citrus blossom in spring and the dust of the olive harvest in autumn. He grew up the son of landowners, expected to help tend the groves, yet he was restless—curious about the world beyond the horizon. Clever, quick-witted, and able to charm without trying, he had the kind of confidence that came from knowing exactly when to speak and when to listen.

When war came, Cyprus was swept into the tide of history. The British Army called for men, and the Cyprus Regiment—farmers, students, tradesmen—sailed west into the unknown. My father was barely out of boyhood when he landed at the port of Napoli, the city still scarred from bombing but alive with a resilience that defied ruin.

AI picture of troops embarking from a troop ship

A soldier from Cyprus helps bring freedom to a child in Italy

And it was there that life made its own plan for him, in the form of a beautiful Italian schoolteacher from Napoli. Her name was Valenzuella.

I have only ever known her face from a single, timeworn photograph—sepia edges curling, her gaze steady yet soft, as though she’s looking at someone she loves just beyond the frame. Even now, faint traces of her red lipstick linger on the paper, a ghost of a kiss pressed into history. On the back, in elegant Italian script, are the words: “ “Al mio amore, con tutta la mia vita.” — “to my love, with all my life…” A friend translated it for me years ago. I have turned that photo over in my hands countless times, wondering if she wrote it just before he left, or perhaps when she still believed he would return.

Even decades later, when he spoke of her, his voice softened as if the words themselves had to pass through a place deep inside him where time had stopped. She was intelligent, warm, and strong-willed. Her laughter, he once told me, could rise above the sound of church bells, and her eyes held the same green as olive leaves after rain.

He had a natural gift for languages, and with her as his teacher, he learned Italian quickly—though she teased him for wrapping her vowels in a Cypriot accent. “She taught me more than words,” he would say. “She taught me how to speak like a man who listens.”

Years later, in Australia, when I introduced him to my Italian friends heard him speak, they would smile in surprise. “He speaks like an old movie,” they’d say. “Like the language of kings.” They didn’t know the truth—it wasn’t just Italian he’d learned. He had been carrying her voice all his life.

AI picture of a ladies hand holding a mans hand

They stole moments when they could: afternoon walks along cobblestone streets, espresso from chipped porcelain cups, quiet talks in shadowed alleys while the world’s chaos raged somewhere else. For them, war briefly bent around their little corner of peace.

Then, one night, the orders came without warning. His regiment was being redeployed. He knew she was pregnant—he told us that much—and he promised her he would return. That night was the last time he ever saw Valenzuella.

When the war ended, he tried to find her. He returned to Napoli, searching through streets still marked by rubble, asking strangers, knocking on doors. But she was gone. He believed her family may have been displaced—perhaps moved north, perhaps gone overseas. In those days, there were no telephones in every home, no easy trails—just unanswered letters and closed doors.

Before long, the Cyprus Regiment was recalled, and Dad returned to Polis-Paphos, to the embrace of familiar fields and the responsibilities of his family’s vast properties. But with him came a heavier burden—the unanswered echo of a goodbye that never found its reply.

Life moved forward. He built a future in Cyprus and later in Australia. He married, raised children—including me—and worked with the steady resolve of a man who honoured his commitments. Yet in the quiet hours, I believe she was still there. A name rarely spoken. A face the years could not erase.

He never romanticised war, but he did romanticise that sliver of time—the warm afternoons, the sound of her voice, the coffee in chipped cups, the unspoken belief that they would somehow find their way back to each other.

My siblings and I grew up knowing there is almost certainly a half-brother or half-sister somewhere in Italy. Someone who may have never known who their father really was. Someone who might look like us. Someone who might have wondered about their own missing piece, just as we did.

Every so often, I find myself looking at faces in old photographs from Naples, searching for some flicker of familiarity—a jawline, a smile, the set of the eyes. Sometimes, I imagine a man or woman now in their seventies or early eighties, sitting at a kitchen table somewhere in Italy, holding a photograph of their mother, and wondering who their father was.

Every time I look at Dad’s photograph—standing in uniform, tall and certain—I don’t just see a soldier. I see a man whose heart once stretched across countries, across wars, across decades.

If this story finds its way to you— perhaps you are in Italy, perhaps you’ve never heard the name Erdogan Hassan Karabardak, perhaps you only know that your mother once loved a soldier from Cyprus during the war— then maybe this is your story too.