Great War relic’s owner traced
As the Turkish soldier lay dying, his friend from a neighbouring village, Murat Ali sat to comfort him in his final moments. Ali dabbed the blood on Yusuf’s face with a handkerchief, taken as a trophy of the “Canakkale War” just days earlier.
For a century, the bloodied handkerchief — embroidered and stitched in a strange hand — has been a treasured heirloom of the Oz family in Hacipehlivan, a rural village near Biga, Turkey.
Yusuf Oz would show it to visitors. Just before he died in 2014, he passed it to his son, Nazmi.
“We have had this handkerchief for 100 years,” Nazmi Oz said. “It’s [a] relic with martyr blood. We didn’t know the words on it.”
That all changed last year, when a local amateur historian paid them a visit. Canakkale school administrator Omer Arslan was in Hacipehlivan to interview war veterans and their families.
The Oz family told them about the handkerchief. Arslan was able to read some English writing on it — George Thomas Uren.
Arslan found Uren’s mother had given him the handkerchief on April 2, 1915, his 28th birthday. Uren was killed in action at Gallipoli a month later, on May 2.
The diminutive sportsman, volunteer fireman, bachelor, and printer at the Dunstan Times in the Clyde office, volunteered at the outbreak of war.
Joining the Otago Infantry Battalion, Uren left Port Chalmers on October 16, 1914. Within days of landing at Anzac Cove, he was involved in New Zealand’s first “big push” of World War I — an assault on a small hill, named Baby 700. The attack, repelled by Ottoman machineguns and mortar fire, was a disaster. Uren died, making him one of 400 men killed or injured.
Darilyn Uren-Perry grew up in Dunedin with a vague notion that a relative had been “lost in the Dardanelles”.
Many years later, a niece returned from a trip to the Gallipoli peninsula with news that a Uren featured on the memorial at Lone Pine.
Uren-Perry discovered it was her grandfather’s uncle. On a family trip to the war memorial in Clyde, they found it was incorrectly etched with a “C Uren”.
Then, two years ago, her son Stephen Potter researched his forgotten forefather and worked with Central Otago District Council to have the memorial updated to “G Uren”.
When the Herald contacted Uren-Perry to ask if she was related to George Thomas Uren, because his Gallipoli handkerchief has surfaced in a tiny Turkish village, she was “stunned, excited and very emotional”.
There are now plans by a TurkishNew Zealand friendship group to fly Uren-Perry to Turkey to meet the Oz family this year, and be reunited with the handkerchief.
It never occurred to Nazmi Oz that the artefact could have ever belonged to anyone else. However, he said his family would welcome Uren’s family if they came to visit.
Nazmi Oz was repatriating the relic.
“Maybe a photo could be taken. It has our grandfather’s blood on it. If we have it, it would be better I think. I want to pass it on to my kids.” torn over