Petros Mengous

Petros Mengous (Greek: Πέτρος Μέγγους; (1802- ) was a Greek soldier, pirate, author, and educator. He fought in the Greek War of Independence for over five years and migrated to the United States, where he wrote a narrative of his experience, telling the American people about the horrors of the Greek War in the book Narrative of a Greek Soldier published in 1830. Petros spoke Modern and Classical Greek, Arabic, Italian, and French. He eventually taught at the Mount Pleasant Classical Institute with Gregory Anthony Perdicaris. American missionary Jonas King married his sister Anna Aspasia Mengou on the Island of Dino, where King built his first women's school.

Petros was born in Smyrna, to Eleftherius "Levtrachi" Mengous in a small Greek village named Koukloutzas. Koukloutzas was a small village in Ottoman Turkey primarily inhabited by Greeks in the early 1800s. After the onset of the Greek War of Independence, Petros served in the Greek Army and Navy. He provided support and raised money to help free slaves, and he kept a chronicle of the events that transpired during the war. Petros migrated to the United States in 1828 and eventually traveled to New Orleans, where he worked on a ship in the Gulf of Mexico. During the period, New Orleans had a large Greek community consisting primarily of the Dimitry Family of New Orleans.