EditTo solve bilateral problems, Greece and Turkey must first name them
Cyprus, the Aegean, Western Thrace and historical memory all point to the same missing diagnosis
The unresolved Greek-Turkish problem is usually described through the Aegean: islands, airspace, territorial waters, militarisation, maps and treaties. Yet the dispute does not stop there. It reaches Cyprus, the Eastern Mediterranean, Western Thrace and the deeper politics of historical memory. The central failure comes before all of them. Greece and Turkey do not agree on what the problem is.
That failure allows the two sides to keep meeting without really negotiating. Delegations travel between Athens and Ankara, polite meals are shared, familiar statements are issued and everyone calls it dialogue. When the central diagnosis is avoided, however, diplomacy becomes diplomatic tourism.
Athens still comes to the table with one recognised dispute – the delimitation of maritime zones – while Ankara sees a wider chain of files that begins in the Aegean, reaches Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean, and touches Western Thrace through the politics of identity and recognition.
The dispute creates another dispute before diplomacy even begins. The two sides do not agree on what should be discussed.
The dispute before the dispute
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has repeatedly stated the Greek position clearly. Greece, he says, has one major difference with Turkey: the delimitation of maritime zones in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. Other Turkish claims, in his view, are unfounded, and no Greek prime minister would negotiate them.
That position has legal and political weight in Athens, and it should not be dismissed casually. But it also narrows the room before negotiations begin. No serious settlement can grow from an agenda that one side defines in advance and the other side experiences as incomplete.
The old medical wisdom still applies, not least in the part of the world that gave us Hippocrates. Treatment begins with diagnosis, and the Greek-Turkish file has lived for decades with treatment attempts that never rested on an agreed diagnosis.
Ankara’s wider map
Ankara’s map is wider than Athens’s agenda. Turkey sees islands placed close to its coast, a possible twelve-nautical-mile extension, contested airspace, militarization files, operational zones and Kastellorizo carrying consequences far beyond its size. Kastellorizo sits far closer to Kaş than to the Greek mainland, yet its maritime effect reaches deep into Eastern Mediterranean politics.
The map does not stop at the Aegean. It runs toward Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean.
In Turkish strategic thinking, Cyprus functions as the eastern extension of the same maritime anxiety that begins in the Aegean.
This piece is not a Cyprus settlement proposal. That file deserves a separate argument. Here, Cyprus matters because it shows how the Greek-Turkish problem refuses to stay inside the Aegean.
Diplomats often separate the files. The Aegean becomes territorial waters, airspace, demilitarization and islands. Cyprus becomes guarantees, communities, sovereignty and recognition. Ankara’s strategic map does not divide them so neatly. A Turkey that believes its maritime movement is being narrowed in the Aegean will read Cyprus as the eastern lock of the same enclosure.
The failure of naming
The same failure of naming appears on land, in Western Thrace.
Greece has a legal argument. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne refers to the Muslim minority in Greece, not to a Turkish minority. That textual point exists and should be acknowledged. Yet a treaty formula from a century ago cannot become a ceiling on identity in today’s Europe.
The European Court of Human Rights has treated Greek restrictions on associations using Turkish identity language as a freedom-of-association problem. In 2025, the court found a violation in the refusal to register the Cultural Association of Turkish Women of the Prefecture of Xanthi. The case was not about secession, violence or public disorder. It was about civic language.
The anxiety around names is not new. In 1999, George Papandreou, then Greece’s foreign minister and later prime minister, was attacked at home after treating self-description as less dangerous than the state believed it to be. If borders are not being challenged, the question of whether a citizen calls himself Turkish, Pomak or something else should not automatically become a national-security crisis.
That is why the Fenerbahçe supporters’ association case matters. A football supporters’ association is not a border claim. It is not a security doctrine. It is civic life. When even that space becomes sensitive because the word “Turkish” may appear in Western Thrace, the issue has already moved beyond law into politics.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew recently warned that minorities should not be turned into hostages of Greek-Turkish disputes. The warning cuts through both national reflexes. Minorities are citizens, not diplomatic instruments.
Bartholomew’s own title shows the same problem from the other side. President Erdoğan received him at the Presidential Complex in June, and Turkey’s official statement described him as the Orthodox Patriarch of Fener, not as the Ecumenical Patriarch. That is Ankara’s domestic terminology. But whether Bartholomew is received as the Ecumenical Patriarch in Washington, Paris or the wider Orthodox world is not a question for any governor’s office in Turkey to settle. It belongs to theology, ecclesiastical history and the internal vocabulary of Christianity.
This does not require Turkey to change its domestic legal position overnight. It requires something more basic: the ability to distinguish state recognition from theological vocabulary. In Greek-Turkish disputes, names are rarely just names. They become tests of sovereignty, identity and historical anxiety.
When geography turns law into strategy
Law matters, but it does not operate in a vacuum. In the Aegean, geography turns law into strategy.
Greece believes it stands on firm legal ground. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea allows states to establish territorial seas up to twelve nautical miles. Athens therefore treats a possible extension as a sovereign right rooted in international law.
Turkey reads the same move through a different map. The Aegean is not an open ocean. It is a narrow, crowded and historically loaded sea, with Greek islands lying close to the Anatolian coast and maritime zones overlapping in ways that make every legal formula strategic. Ankara’s official calculation is blunt. If territorial waters in the Aegean were extended to twelve nautical miles, Greek territorial waters would rise from about 40 percent of the sea to more than 70 percent, while Turkey’s share would remain below 10 percent and the high seas would shrink sharply.
The same map also contains the 1995 Turkish Grand National Assembly declaration, widely described in Greece as a casus belli. Athens sees it as a standing threat against a sovereign right. Ankara presents it as a political warning issued after the Greek Parliament empowered the government to extend territorial waters to twelve nautical miles. Whatever label one chooses, the declaration proves the point. A legal entitlement in the abstract becomes a security trigger in the Aegean.
That is why the legal debate has to face the map. Show the Aegean to an ordinary reader in Athens, Amsterdam or Ankara. Ask that reader to imagine a twelve-nautical-mile extension from the Anatolian shore. Would that map look like law alone, or would it also look like maritime compression?
A legal right that the other side experiences as strategic narrowing cannot be treated as a technical matter. This does not cancel law. It means law, geography and fear produce different maps.
That is also why Turkey has to be careful with its own maritime vocabulary. The core Turkish maritime claims deserve serious legal consideration, but the language of “Homeland” can turn technical delimitation into a zero-sum identity question. The strongest Turkish case is not built by making the map louder. It is built by making the legal argument harder to dismiss.
Fear is part of the map
Greek fear should not be mocked as paranoia. It is part of the strategic reality of the Aegean.
A person living on Lesvos, Chios or Samos does not read the Aegean only through treaty clauses. The view from those islands includes the Anatolian coast, Turkish military depth, demographic asymmetry and the memory of Turkey’s 1974 military intervention in Cyprus. That fear should not decide the law, and it should not freeze sovereignty debates forever. But a Turkish argument that cannot understand why the fear exists will not persuade anyone who lives with that horizon.
Island geography has its own psychology. Bounded space, limited depth and direct exposure to the opposite shore shape political instinct. Add the asymmetry between Greece and Turkey, the memory of Ottoman rule, the Asia Minor catastrophe and Cyprus, and the Greek security reflex becomes understandable even when Ankara rejects its legal conclusions.
Understanding fear is not surrender. It is the beginning of serious diplomacy.
The wounds both sides carry
Turkish memory also carries its own wounds. Greek political memory contains Ottoman rule, the Greek War of Independence, Asia Minor and Cyprus. Turkish political memory contains imperial collapse, lost provinces, foreign intervention and the long fear that Greek and Armenian communities, once embedded inside the Ottoman order, could become linked, in moments of collapse, with separatism, external pressure and territorial loss.
The Balkan wound is even more immediate. Many Turks look west not only through the map of the Aegean, but also through family memory – Serres, Kavala, Drama, Selanik, Western Thrace, Macedonia, Bulgaria, the population exchange, the Balkan Wars and the long road of Muslim refugees into Anatolia all belong to that archive.
The Greek national anthem itself shows how deep war memory runs. Its official verses do not need to name the Turk to carry the atmosphere of struggle. The longer poem from which the anthem comes goes further into the Greek War of Independence and the fall of Tripolitsa. This is not a reason to indict modern Greece. It is a reminder that national anthems preserve wounds as much as they celebrate freedom.
Greek independence is remembered in Europe largely as a heroic national liberation. Turkish memory also contains the destruction of Muslim and Turkish communities in the Peloponnese and the massacre at Tripolitsa. Those memories do not decide today’s law. They explain why history enters the room before diplomats begin to speak.
Diplomacy fails when each side treats its own fear as history and the other side’s fear as propaganda.
Intimate adversaries
Greece and Turkey are not strangers facing each other across a cold frontier. They are intimate adversaries. The Greek-Turkish case runs through language, music, food, cities, families, religion, empire and exile.For an “İstanbullu Rum,” there may be only one City – the Poli, Constantinople. In Greece, descendants of people from Smyrna, Ayvalık, Cappadocia, Pontus or Eastern Thrace still carry Anatolia as a lost home. In Turkey, families from Crete, Macedonia, Western Thrace and the Balkans carry the same century as loss from the other shore.
The same dishes are claimed with different flags. The same melodies carry different sorrows. The same sea is remembered as homeland, loss, escape and return. This intimacy does not make the conflict easier. Sometimes it makes it harder.
Remembering more honestly
This is why reconciliation between Greece and Turkey cannot be built on forgetting. It has to be built on remembering more honestly.
History proves that today’s taboos are not eternal. The founding generation of the Turkish Republic fought the Greek army on the western front. Yet within a decade, Ankara and Athens signed a friendship treaty, Eleftherios Venizelos nominated Mustafa Kemal Atatürk for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the two states entered the Balkan Entente together.
Atatürk was born in Ottoman Selanik, today’s Thessaloniki – a city of trade, newspapers, schools, military officers and reformist politics. His birthplace still draws Turkish visitors as a site of national memory inside Greece.
During the Second World War, Turkish humanitarian channels carried food to occupied Greece. The Kurtuluş ship and others brought aid and helped sick Greek children recover in Istanbul.
Western Thrace Turks fought and died as Greek citizens against the Axis. These crossings show that the archive is not made only of hostility.
The early 1950s are also worth remembering. King Paul and Queen Frederica visited Turkey in 1952, and President Celal Bayar visited Greece the same year. Visa requirements were lifted, reciprocal fishing arrangements were signed, and the two states entered NATO together.
Cyprus shows what happens when a problem is not diagnosed early enough. Failure to diagnose the problem early did not alone create the crisis, but it helped leave the field to others until the crisis became harder to manage.
The poverty of imagination
The Greek-Turkish file does not suffer from a shortage of legal arguments. It suffers from a shortage of diplomatic imagination.
A serious settlement culture would test ideas before banning them. Shared search-and-rescue mechanisms, joint coast guard structures, demilitarized belts, rotating command arrangements, common energy ventures, revenue-sharing formulas and even territorial arrangements that sound unthinkable today should not be treated as betrayal merely because they disturb inherited slogans.
Energy should be part of that imagination. If commercially viable resources are ever developed, a Turkish-Hellenic Energy Corporation, jointly owned or jointly regulated, could turn contested wealth into shared public benefit.
These are not proposals to be announced tomorrow morning. They are tests of seriousness. A political class that cannot even imagine a joint search-and-rescue mechanism in the Aegean cannot honestly claim to be preparing its people for settlement.
The status quo also has its own radicalism. Two NATO allies living one incident away from crisis over rocks, waters, airspace and names is not moderation. It only looks normal because the region has grown used to it.
A taboo is not a strategy
Domestic politics should not hijack relations between Greece and Turkey. The Greek-Turkish file is too serious to be managed by election slogans, television anger or the fear of being called weak at home.
The disputes remain unresolved not only because they are difficult, but because they have become useful. Governments return to them when they need patriotic language. Parties use them to accuse rivals of weakness. Bureaucracies manage them as permanent files. Militaries plan around them. Media markets feed on the anger they produce.
Managed tension is not peace. It is postponed imagination.
Managed division is not peace
Cyprus is the clearest proof that managed division can become a political habit. The island remains divided not only because solutions are difficult, but because exclusion has been made comfortable.
The Annan Plan remains the most important warning. In 2004, the Turkish Cypriots voted yes to the United Nations settlement plan, while the Greek Cypriots voted no. One week later, the Republic of Cyprus entered the European Union. The politically decisive direct-trade track never became reality. That failure still shapes the Turkish Cypriot argument today.
The first settlement will begin in language
The first settlement will not be signed on a map. It will begin in language.
Greece says the only recognised dispute is maritime-zone delimitation. Turkey says the map contains a wider chain of disputes. Without a shared diagnosis, dialogue becomes ritual.
A real Greek-Turkish dialogue would not begin with another polite communiqué. It would begin with the courage to ask whether the two sides are naming the same dispute.
This is not a settlement plan. It is an invitation to think with honesty, courage and imagination. The people capable of changing this relationship do not need another slogan. They need room to ask forbidden questions without being accused of surrender or treason.
The first step is not concession. The first step is the political courage to think.
This original article with EUalive’s partner Bosphorus News can be found here.
Caption: AI-generated illustrative image [Bosphorus News]
Updated: July 6, 2026 - 06:13
