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Most people find peace and ­relaxation on holiday, but Peter Knee found something much more precious – his mother.

After being adopted as a newborn, Peter had almost given up hope of ever finding his birth mum.

But a trip to Greece last September changed everything. Not only was Maria Bratsi, 80, still alive, she was living on the remote island of Ikaria.

“I couldn’t believe it,” says sports therapist Peter, 56. “It was a dream come true.”

He was 10 when he discovered he was adopted and grew up not knowing who his real parents were.

“All I knew about my mum was that she was Greek and possibly living on the island of Kos,” recalls Peter, from Worthing, West ­Sussex. “But I’d had a happy childhood. My brothers and sisters, Keith, Teresa and Gail, treated me as their brother and I always felt just like them.”

His adoptive dad, Frederick, 90, and mum Irene, who died 10 years ago, supported him when he decided to look for his parents after having two children, Mark and Sarah, with wife Linda.

He struggled to make a breakthrough in his search but then, a decade later, his real dad suddenly contacted him.

During his childhood, he had received Christmas cards from a mysterious man calling himself Uncle Peter – it turned out it was ­actually his father.

Peter and Linda went to visit him in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, where he lived, but it was something of a disappointment. “He was nice, but it felt like meeting a stranger,” he says. ‘There was no warmth or bond.”

He was, however, able to tell him more about his mother, explaining how, when he was in the Army, he met Greek Maria Bratsi as she was travelling through Israel with her family.

“They fell in love and she moved to England,” Peter explains. “They lived in Hove for about seven years before the relationship fell apart.”

“At 23 she got pregnant with me but the marriage was practically over.”

Maria ended up depressed and in a refuge in Eastbourne after the split.

She was in such a bad way she was deemed unfit to look after a child and Peter was put up for adoption days after he was born in August 1954.

Hearing the story made him more determined to find his mother and when his father said he thought she had moved to Kos, Peter decided to go there.

He set off last September, taking his wife and friends Clive and Karen Johnson on a ­part holiday, part hunt.

“I had her marriage ­certificate as well as a ­photograph of her when she was 16,” he says. “But I didn’t even know if she was still alive.”

He trawled through town halls, ploughing into birth and death registers, but found no trace.

But his luck changed when Clive and Karen got in touch with a DJ at a radio station that played to the ­islands scattered around Kos. They arranged a ­meeting and Peter went on the air. “The DJ interviewed me for 15 minutes and I made sure to ­mention everything I knew,” he says.

Incredibly, within just an hour of the live broadcast appeal, there was breakthrough when two islanders called the radio station to say they knew where Maria lived.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” Peter recalls. “It turned out that my mum wasn’t in Kos at all. She’d been living on Ikaria for years.”

Her home, an island with a population of 8,000, was just a 30-minute flight across the Aegean Sea and Peter could not wait to go.

As he boarded a plane with his wife the next morning, Maria made her way to the airport after her sister got in touch to tell her the wonderful news.

Mother and son embraced for the first time when Peter landed and the bond was ­immediately special.

Amid a huge posse of relatives, they began to catch up on the missing years, with the help of a translator.

“It was mind-blowing finally to meet my mother after 56 years,” smiles Peter, tears in his eyes. “The first thing she did was hand me three red roses.”

But Maria, who lives a very simple life in a home perched halfway up a mountain that visitors must trek up 195 steps to reach, ­had a shocking revelation for her son. “I was in a bad state, with ­some ­psychological ­problems,” she says, “so the authorities took my boy away from me and told me that he had died.

“I had no idea that they had put him up for adoption.”

But Peter’s mum, who never ­remarried, ­refused to believe what she was told and spent years pining for the son she very much hoped was still alive.

Struggling to cope, she told people on Ikaria her ­moving, tragic story.

“Lots of the ­islanders know the tale about the woman who ­returned from England without her baby,” Peter says.

But the reunion ended years of uncertainty and terrible heartbreak for her.

She says: “I was as happy as happy can be.

“I could barely believe that my long-lost son was looking for me. I’ll never forget ­seeing him and thinking how Greek he looked!

“Our relatives ­immediately saw the facial similarities between us.”

Telling Peter what had ­happened in the refuge all those years ago was painful, but necessary, for Maria.

“I thought the authorities were telling ­me lies and I desperately ­wanted my son to know he was not ­abandoned and that I knew ­nothing about the adoption.

“I had depression, which in those days was classified as psychological problems.”

Her son was shocked to hear how his mother had suffered after losing him.

“I can’t begin to imagine what it must ­have felt like, having your child taken way at birth,” he says, sadly. Desperate to make up for lost time, Peter, travelled back to Ikaria last November to spend more time with his mum.

“We talk non-stop,” he says, happily. “I am learning Greek, but if I want to ask her a question I always do it in ­English. Mum’s English is improving as she tries to remember it from the 1950s.

“But if she is talking very passionately about something, it is usually the case that she reels it off in Greek.”

Though Peter has since lost contact with his birth father, he knows he may never have found Maria without his information.

He says. “Kos was the missing link. It set off a chain of extraordinary events, which finally led me to finding her.”

His adoptive family have been very ­supportive of his search for Maria. “My dad told me that he was pleased that I had found her and that I felt that part of my life was now complete,” Peter says.

“My adoptive siblings were also fantastic about it and really happy for me.”

And when Peter found his mum, he also discovered an extended family of 74 cousins, aunts and uncles. “I’m in the middle of ­sorting out a family tree with everyone’s name,” he smiles. “But you don’t have to walk far in the village before you bump into a relative or someone you know.

“Old ladies come up to me in the street and start crying with joy because they know that I found my mother.”

Now he is looking forward to taking his children over to Ikaria to meet their ­grandmother at long last. For Maria, being reunited with the child she was told had died is the happy ending she’d longed for.

“I had never given up hope,” she says. “In my heart I always felt that he would come and find me.”