At sea in the Aegean 30 years ago, when tensions between Greece and Turkey raised fears of war

Peaceful afternoons on the beach near Rethymnon are seldom interrupted by sonic booms and overflights, unlike 30 years ago (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I have been coming to Greece and to Crete in particular, for almost 40 years, since the 1980s. I remember how I felt at home the very first morning, as I was being taken by coach from Iraklion Airport to Rethymnon. Greece grew on me very quickly, and there were times when I was back and forth to Greece two or three times a year, sometimes for family holidays, sometimes for social visits, and often as a working journalist, covering Greek politics, culture, economic crisises, tensions with Turkey in the Aegean. On other trips, I was visiting monasteries and churches, including Mount Athos and Patmos, or attending lectures and seminars in Athens, Thessaloniki and on the remote and tiny island of Halki off the coast of Rhodes.

One of those busy years was 1996, when I found myself writing about Greek life and politics on a regular basis. I was reminded of this last month when friends posted about the 30th anniversary of the death of Andreas Papanddreou, a towering and heroic modern Greek leader and a key figure in bringing about the collapse of the colonels’ regime in 1974. He died on 23 June 1996, and I wrote his obituary for The Irish Times the next day.

But 1996 was a busy year for me in Greece. I wrote profiles of the new prime minister, Costas Simitis, interviewed the foreign minister, Theodoros Pangalos, followed the tensions in the Aegean over the Turkey’s agressive claims to the islets of Imia, wrote features on the poetry of Yiannis Ritos and CP Cavafy, reported on the growing clamour for the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum to Athens, and analysed Greek political support for the application by Cyprus for EU membership.

In recent years, I have been returning regularly to Rethymnon and the suburban areas to the east at Platanias and Tsesmes and even further east at Panormos. It is a relatively quiet area for holidays, with the long sandy beches stretching for miles east of Rethymnon. There is a family-friendly and laid-back atmosphere, with few if any signs offering cheap beer to lager louts, as I have seen further east in places such as Hersonissos and Malia.

It is easy to fall asleep in the afternoon at places like Pavlos Beach in Platanias, undisturbed in the sunshine. But it was not always so, and it was not so 30 years ago, back in 1996. Not because of loud lager louts, not because Crete was attracting the wrong sort of tourists, and certainly not because of bad management on anyone’s part. But because of the threat of war.

An afternoon’s snooze on the beach was regularly interrupted in the 1980s and the 1990s by the sonic booms of overflying Greek air force jets, preparing or returning from buzzing their Turkish counterparts over the blue waters of the Aegean and the Mediterranean.

It almost came to a full-scale war between Greece and Turkey 30 years ago, and all because of a dispute over who owned the two tiny uninhabited rocky islets of Imia. I was flown into the middle of it all in 1996, and ended up as a part of a press posse that was threatened with coming under fire from the Turkish navy.

The dispute back in 1996 cost the lives of three crew members of a Greek Navy helicopter who died during a mission, and 30 years later, despite improved relations between Athens and Ankara in the intervening decades, many Greeks have not forgotten this tense time in modern Greek history a generation ago.

The crisis had international leaders scrambling to urge both sides not to come to blows over what was derided as a pile of rocks. But Greece insisted they were ‘Greek rocks’m and Athens refused to back down as Ankara tried to assert Turkish sovereignty. Greeks were reminded all too easily of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus over 20 years earlier on 20 July 1974.

Windmills at the entrance to the harbour in Rhodes (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Imia is part of the Dodesanese islands, which are dripping with history and oozing with culture: Kos, where Hippocrates formulated the foundations of modern medicine; Patmos, where Saint John the Divine wrote the Book of Revelation; Kalymnos, Leros and Symi, with their neo-classical mansions; and Rhodes, where the giant Colossos once straddled the harbour of Mandhraki, holding aloft the flame of freedom that inspired the Statue of Liberty.

At the crossroads of three continents, this island chain was once ruled by Alexander the Great and Ptolemy; it has been occupied by the Romans, the Crusaders, the Venetians, the Knights of Saint John, the Turks, the Italians and Nazi Germany. Only with the end of World War II was it finally handed over by Britain and incorporated into the Greek state almost 80 years ago, in 1947.

Today, only 26 of the Dodecanese islands are inhabited: the largest, Rhodes, has about 100,000 people, but most have only a few hundred residents or less, and there are only 79 people left on Pserimos.

The large Turkish minorities in Rhodes and Kos and the mosques and minarets still dotting the skylines of many islands are ever-present reminders that Turkey occupied the Dodecanese for almost 400 years, from 1522 to 1912. Turkey is Greece’s nearest neighbour, and on many islands you can feel it is almost possible to touch the Turkish coast with its harbours and towns, houses and hotels.

On 29 December 1995, Turkey asserted the Imia islets were Turkish territory, registered in the prefecture of Bodrum. The dispute began when a Turkish cargo ship, Figen Akat ran ashore on the islets and had to be salvaged. It turned out that maps of were showing conflicting claims of the islets by Greece and Turkey, and there was a conflict between the Turkish captain and the Greek authorities over who was responsible for the salvage operation.

For more than 60 years, Turkey had accepted the maritime boundaries in the Aegean, defined by treaties and agreements with the Italians in 1923 and 1932, and ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1947. The boundaries were never challenged by Ankara until that December. But, as Turkey faced a major political crisis with the unexpected electoral success of the Islamic Welfare Party, the Foreign Ministry in Ankara claimed for the first time that Imia was part of the Turkish province of Mugla.

The official response of Greece came on 9 January 1996. The then-Greek Foreign Minister, Theodoros Pangalos, sent a reply to Turkey claiming an indisputable Greek sovereignty over the islets. The dispute was escalated when the Mayor of the Greek island of Kalymnos and a priest landed on the islets on 26 January and raised a Greek flag on the rocky outcrop.

Tensions escalated, and on 27 January Turkish journalists from the daily Hurriyet landed on the largest of the two Imia islets, tore down the blue and white Greek flag and hoisted the red and white star and crescent of Turkey.

Four days later, Turkish troops landed on the smaller rocky outcrop. Tensions heightened as Greek, Turkish and NATO forces sailed to the islets. At dawn on 31 January, a Greek navy helicopter flying over Imia said reported that Turkish troops had landed on the islets. The helicopter then crashed in mysterious circumstances. The crash was blamed on bad weather conditions, but some reports said the weather reports amounted to a mutual cover-up to hide that it was shot down by Turkish fire.

Both Athens and Ankara were accused of concealing what really happened to prevent war. The two countries had been on the brink of war when President Clinton intervened and the Turkish troops withdrew.

The minaret of a mosque in Rhodes (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

At the time, I was the Foreign Desk Editor of The Irish Times and I found myself in the middle of this crisis. I flew to Athens to interview the new Greek Prime Minister, Costas Simitis, his Foreign Minister, Theodoros Pangalos, and other cabinet ministers. A few days later I was one among a small group of about two dozen journalists who travelled from Athens and boarded the NV Nissos in Kos Harbour, close to the Plane Tree of Hippocrates and the Mosque of Hatzi Hassan.

At the time, the NV Nissos offered day trips to Turkey on Saturdays and Sundays, leaving Kos at 9 a.m. and returning at 5 p.m. But this was to be no pleasure cruise. We were reminded of an ever-present fear of an invasion from Anatolia, 5 km across the stretch of water. The local people were talking in terms of ‘when the Turks come’, not ‘if’.

With blue skies and blue seas, it could have been an idyllic summer trip. Apart from goat herds and environmentalists, few people ever bothered to visit the more remote rocks off the coast of Kos, Kalymnos, Kalolymnos and Pserimos. The crew took down the sign reading ‘Turkey’ as we sailed off for the islets of Imia or Limnia, two flat pancakes less than two miles from Kalolymnos, almost 2½ miles from the Turkish island of Cavus, and over three miles from the western-most Turkish coast on the peninsula of Bodrum.

The Greek naval frigate HS Limnos, which had taken part in operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, was fresh back from the Adriatic and had offered to take us out to look at the rocks. But before we left, Turkey protested formally and summoned the Greek Ambassador in Ankara, Dimitrios Nezeritis, to warn against the media trip.

It was no idle warning: two days earlier, a Greek coastguard vessel and a Turkish patrol boat had collided in Greek waters, a mile south of Imia.

As we sailed out of Kos, the military tension was palpable and visible. Greek and Turkish jets buzzed overhead sporadically, a Greek coastguard vessel and a navy ship were within sight and, in the distance, we could catch a glimpse of a ship with Turkish naval markings.

Costas Bikas, the Foreign Ministry spokesman from Athens on board the Nissos, insisted there was nothing out of the ordinary about the cruise and that it was none of Ankara’s business. But the Turks made it their business. As the Greek and Turkish jet fighters swooped low over the area, the Turkish foreign ministry took a group of foreign and local journalists out from Bodrum. Once again, there were new Turkish claims to the islets known to the Turks as Kardak – by Defence Minister Oltan Sunguklu and by naval spokesman Ali Kurunahmut, who told cruising journalists: ‘Kardak is a Turkish islet and we are in Turkish waters.’

Trailing both groups were reporters and camera crews from the Greek and Turkish press and television. The crisis had moved from territorial claims and counter claims to cruise and counter cruise for journalists in the Aegean. As Imia faded out of sight, we followed past Pserimos, Kalolymnos, Leros and Kalymnos, through the straits separating Kalymnos and Telendhos, into Pothia, the port harbour of Kalymnos – names that once tripped off the tongues of backpackers in the 1970s.

As we disembarked at the dockside in Pothia, the microphones and cameras crowded into our faces: the foreign media had become the message.

The rocky island of Kalymnos is famous for its traditional sponge fishing; its fame in the past rested on Homer’s reference in the Iliad to the ships from the ‘Kalyndian Islands’ taking part in the Trojan wars. That day, we felt war remained an ever-present threat to the peace of the islanders and their sponge fishers.

The Nissos returned to Kos to prepare for Sunday’s day trippers to Bodrum, and a launch from the Hellenic Coast Guard took us out from the harbour to the navy frigate Limnos, with its crew waiting to take us on to Rhodes. For four hours, we watched the crew tracking Turkish moves in the Aegean sea and skies, before our odyssey came to an end and Rhodes came into sight with its mediaeval castles and palaces, mosques and minarets and three harbours.

Two deer stand at each end of Mandhrki where the Colossos once straddled the entrance to the harbour, with ships passing through its towering legs. A small tug, the Herakles, took us ashore, reminding us of the apt inscription that once graced Colossus, praising the lovely gift of unlettered freedom. ‘For to those who spring from the race of Herakles, dominion is a heritage both on land and sea.’

The crisis was a temporary boost at home to Turkey’s Tansu Ciller as she searched (in vain) for a coalition partner to keep her in power. But it threatened to bring down Costas Simitis, Theodoros Pangalos and their Pasok government in Athens in 1996. Both sides agreed to withdraw their forces from the area around Imia and return to the status quo ante, although Ms Ciller continued to press Turkey’s claims to 3,000 Aegean islands – the sum total of all islands in Greek waters.

After intense pressure from the US, Greek and Turkish government removed their military forces from Imia. The territorial issue has remained unresolved since then. Imia and other islets in the Aegean are considered as ‘grey zones’ of undetermined sovereignty by Turkey.

When I returned to Crete a few weeks later for a family holiday in Piskopiano, my interviews with the Greek media and my appearances on Greek television became a topic of conversation over lunch with Greek friends on the island. Overhead, the sonic booms of fighter jets continued to break the peace of afternoon naps by the pool or on the beach.

When I returned a second time from Greece, The Irish Times published a major feature on my adventures on this day 30 years ago, 6 July 1996. I think the headline ‘Dropping Ankara in Rhodes,’ with its intended pun, was written by the then Design Editor, Andy Barclay.

The casual freedom of land and sea, to hop from one island to the next, is part of the lure of a holiday in the sun in many parts of Greece. But it is a freedom that comes with a price, a freedom that is valued by the local Greeks, and a freedom that is denied 30 years later to many refugees who come in search of it as they make the difficult passage from the coast of Turkey to the islands of the Dodecanese.

Greek and Turkish flags flying on a passenger ferry plying the Aegean between Greek islands and the Turkish coast (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Georges Meis and his photographs of summer colours on Greek islands

An image of Santorini by Georges Meis, bought in Rethymnon last year (click on image for full-screen resolution) …

… is based on one of his well-known original photographs

Patrick Comerford

You may not be familiar with the name of Georges Meis. But if you have been on holiday in Greece then I am sure you know his work as a photographer, even if you have not noticed his name.

His photographs appear on many of the most popular postcards throughout Greece, and his collections of photographs provide some of those popular, heavy colourful books that tourists bring home as presents or coffee table books.

His exceptional photos of stunning Greek Island scenery, especially Santorini, Mykonos and Crete, are easy to recognise and have been reproduced on thousands of postcards, posters, calendars, placemats, magnet calendars, and other souvenir items sold throughout Greece.

They capture the colours of Greece, particularly the blue domes, doors and windows and white walls that create images that are now almost every tourist’s stereotypical image of Greece in the mind’s eye.

But Georges Meis also captures wild primary colours, fading doors, mesmerising sunsets and gnarled and dignified faces of old people who know every joy and every hardship that modern Greece has endured.

Almost every year, without failure, I have had a calendar with his photographs hanging in one of my studies or offices, and each year I buy countless copies of his photographs on postcards – not to send to family and friends but just as keepsakes to enjoy as the sun fades and summer turns to autumn.

The 3,000 bare, rocky outcrops in the blue Aegean are his raw material as an artist. His eye, how he frames and catches old doors, narrow steps, inviting alleyways and the domes of churches, and the way he uses panoramic opportunities to provide vistas of harbours, bays and island shorelines have inspired my own efforts to take photographs in Crete.

His panoramic photographs, which are a result of a lifetime of research, were considered avant garde when they were first published. It was the first time that photographs taken from an angle of 360 degrees were presented in compositions like these. It is so easy to forget how revolutionary and influential he has been now that we all have apps that allow us to take panoramic photographs with our iPhones.

Although Georges Meis has been taking photographs since he was a 14-year-old, he only became seriously involved in photography while he was studying to be an electrician. By 1973, he could no longer restrain his passion for photography. He went to Paris to study photography and cinema, and there he widened his views and the range of his photographic experience.

When he returned to Greece, his first expectation was to establish his name in the glamourous world of fashion photography, and for five years he lived in the world of fashion photography, working in his own Meis Studios.

But, at the peak of his success, he realised he was still not fulfilled. He gave up the glamour and commercialism of fashion photography to concentrate solely on creating fine art photographic prints.

Ever since, he has walked the length and breadth of the Greek isles, seeking out hidden corners and the inconsequential details of everyday life. The warmth of the Greece and its people speak through a worn mat, a well-trodden stairway, an open door, colourful staircases, pots, walls and ripening fruit.

He became known for his series of postcards that became popular with tourists, and many of his photographs of Crete soon became famous as they were reproduced on postcards and posters and earned worldwide attention.

He attracted international attention for his unique presentations of the Greek islands – particularly Crete, Rhodes, the Cycladic and Aegean islands such as Santorini and Mykonos, and Dodecanese islands including Rhodes and Symi – and mainland Greece too. He has exhibited at international fairs in New York, Atlanta, Sydney and Birmingham.

He first saw Crete in the 1970s. Inspired by his early reading of writers such as Nikos Kanzatakis and Thanos Kondylakis and the music of Nikos Xylouris, who made him ‘feel Cretan since childhood,’ he approached Crete, ‘camera in hand – taking photographs wherever he went.’

His book – or is it an album? – Land of Crete, Land of the First European Civilisation (2000), took six years to produce, from 1994 to 2000.

This book is a fulfilment of promises first made almost three decades earlier to a Sfakiot shepherd, Manolis Nikoloudakis, and to Yiorgis Anyfantakis, a well-known photographer from Kastelli Kissamos. Both had encouraged the young Georges Meis when he was journeying throughout Crete after he had returned to Greece from Paris. Some of Meis’s black and white photographs taken at that time were included in the book – atmospheric images of elderly villagers and their day-by-day life: baking bread, tending animals, gossiping on the village bench.

After an introductory tour through Cretan mythology and Minoan civilisation, Georges Meis plunges into the wonderful colours and textures of the modern world. Many of the photographs are in a fold-out form, presented in angles as wide as 360 degrees, offering truly panoramic views from many different points. The colours are glorious, the shots superb, the locations varied and interesting – ranging from a detail of a stone step or a blazing geranium in a pot, through to a majestic vista of the Lefka Ori or White Mountains covered in snow.

Georges Meis freely confesses, however, that he has tinkered with some of his photographs to remove the more modern and less photogenic things he did not want in his pictures.

Two other coffee table books of his spectacular photographs – Thera or Santorini, Born from Tephra (2006) and The Diamonds of the Aegean (2007) – are also popular treasures for travellers to take home from their Greek holidays.

Then, 14 years after his first book on Crete, Meis produced his second album on the island, Crete – Mother of the European Civilisation. He says: ‘In essence, I would say this is something new. Something, perhaps more modern. However, the old exists side by side with the new.’

I often find copies of his work are hanging in rooms in hotel rooms and apartments I rent on holidays in Greece.

Last year, while I was browsing through the shop at the Fortezza in Rethymnon during my few weeks in Crete, I added to my collection of photographs and postcards by Georges Meis when I bought two ‘canvas-effect’ images based on his photographs taken in Santorini.

They evoke sweet memories of a relaxed, sunny, summer afternoon about 30 years ago in Santorini, sitting on a balcony listening to Mozart, looking out across the caldera and watching the sun set beyond the neighbouring islands of Nea Kameni, Palea Kameni and Therasia. Now they are framed and hanging in the front room of Saint Mary’s Rectory in Askeaton. They have joined the other posters, photographs and paintings on these walls. And I am looking forward to the promise of another return journey to Crete this summer.

A second image of Santorini by Georges Meis, bought in Rethymnon last year (click on image for full-screen resolution) …

… is based on another of his well-known original photographs

Islanders remember waves of invaders

World View

Patrick Comerford

Kremasti and the small villages of Rhodes, with their tavernas, white-washed domed churches and neoclassical public buildings, appear for all the world like picture-postcard Greece. It is hard to imagine that Rhodes and its neighbouring islands in the Dodecanese have been part of the modern Greek state for only 50 years.

Looking across the narrow strait that separates the western coast of Rhodes from the thin, finger-like peninsulas that jut out from Anatolian Turkey, it is easy to understand why local people talk in terms of “when the Turks come,” and rarely “if …”

The shore line is pock-marked with gun positions which, despite their wilting camouflage, are always ready for use. Turkey and Greece have gone to war twice this century, and both states have yet to find a way to implement an agreement reached 10 years on reducing tensions in the Aegean.

The signs of invasions that came wave after wave are to be seen throughout the island. Rhodes has been attacked or conquered by each and every civilisation that has sought to impose its might on the Mediterranean, including the Minoans, the Dorians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Byzantines, Genoese pirates, and the Crusading Knights of Rhodes, who were forced by the Turks to abandon the island for Malta in 1522.

In the old town of Rhodes, the Turks have left a monumental legacy, with their terracotta pink mosques and minarets, Ottoman libraries and harems, fountains, baths and bazaars providing an oriental atmosphere in the narrow streets with their hanging balconies. There is still a small minority of 4,000 Muslims of Turkish origin on the island, and their integration into island life is typified by Mustafa, the taxi driver, who insists on being called Taki by his colleagues.

But while the Turks left their mark mainly in the old town, the Italians were the last invading force to leave their mark everywhere in Rhodes and throughout the Dodecanese. Despite their name, there are more than 12 islands in the Dodecanese: over 1,000 islands – only 26 are inhabited – fell to Italians after they defeated the Turks in 1912.

Under the command of the Italian Governor, Mario de Vecchi, Italian architects rebuilt the Palace of the Grand Masters, destroyed in an explosion in 1856, as a summer residence for King Victor Emmanuel III and Mussolini. They were given free rein to their fantasies and proved indiscriminate in their mixture of architectural styles, features and furnishings, plundering early Christian mosaics from Kos and misplacing them in the upper floors. The overall kitsch effect was later ridiculed by Lawrence Durrell as “a design for a Neapolitan ice”. Ironically, the rebuilding was completed in 1939, and neither the king nor Il Duce ever stayed in the palace.

A project that was a disaster – although on a lesser scale – was the building work at Kalithea, where Hippocrates had advised his patients to take the spa waters for kidney and arthritic complaints. The Italians tried to restore the thermal baths, laid out terraced tropical gardens, and built domed pavilions with pink marbled pillars, arcades and walks in pseudo-Moorish style. The project failed to attract Italian visitors, and today the site is only of passing interest to tourists on their way south to the popular resorts of Faliraki and Lindos.

Further north in the Dodecanese lies Leros, once famous as the island of Artemis, but now infamous as the home of Greece’s most notorious psychiatric institution, and as the island to which the colonels exiled their opponents. After Mussolini came to power, Italian architects and town planners started working on Mussolini’s vision of a fascist dream town in Lakki, building wide boulevards, a saucer-shaped market building with a clock tower, a cylindrical town hall and fascist centre, and the vast art deco Albergo Romana, later the Leros Palace Hotel, with a cinema and theatre complex.

To defy the Italians, the people of Leros abandoned Lakki and made the village of Platanos their own capital. Today, Mussolini’s summer residence houses the State Therapeutical Hospital, and Lakki is a ghost town by day, resembling a disused film set.

***

BUT, despite Durrell's criticisms of the rebuilding of the old town of Rhodes, the pleasant shape of the new town is a credit to Italian architects. They built the Nea Agora (new market) in the style of an oriental bazaar with a Moorish inner courtyard and a heptagonal domed fish market; they built the imposing and stately Post Office and the Bank of Greece; and they rebuilt the Evangelismos Church, a faithful reconstruction of the Crusaders’ Church of St John. The Governor's Palace - now home to the Greek Orthodox archbishop - mixes elements of Arab, neo-Gothic and Venetian styles, and has been compared by some with Doge’s Palace in Venice.

To view the authentic architectural styles of the islands, one must travel to Symi – squashed between Rhodes and the Marmares peninsula of Turkey – with its pastel-coloured neo-classical houses rising in tiers above the the semi-circle of the harbour they embrace. On the harbour-front at Symi, a small plaque commemorates the surrender of the Germans on May 8th, 1945, and the end of the second World War.

Durrell arrived soon after in Rhodes to edit and to re-establish local newspapers and as part of the British administration. The British continued to administer the Dodecanese and in the old Governor’s Palace in the new town, the Italians formally handed over the Dodecanese in 1947.

This year, Rhodes and the other islands have been marking the 50th anniversary of their incorporation into the Greek state on March 7th, 1948. If Mussolini and Victor Emmanuel never managed to take up residence in the Grand Masters’ Palace, the Italians’ lasting legacy may well be the introduction of tourism to Rhodes. Close to the Villa Kleoboulos, where Durrell once made his home, they built the now-abandoned Hotel des Roses in Moorish style as the island’s first holiday hotel. And while other Greek islands have suffered from depopulation over recent decades, tourism has allowed Rhodes to see its population almost double from 66,000 in 1971 to the present 110,000.

The Italians are welcome and popular tourists today. No longer a threat, they are praised for the efforts to enhance the island’s beauty. But the islanders still look across the straits to Anatolia, and worry about the Turks who first invaded and conquered them in 1522.

This ‘World View’ column was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 13 June 1998

Dropping Ankara in Rhodes

By Patrick Comerford

Early summer is the time to go island hopping in the Aegean. The harbours of Greek islands such as Rhodes, Kos and Kalimnos are lined with small ferries, fishing boats and caiques offering day trips to neighbouring islands in the Dodecanese, and to Greece's nearest neighbour, Turkey.

From Agathonissi in the north to Kastellorizo in the far south east, the Dodecanese is a chain of over 1,000 islands, islets and rocky outcrops at the end of the eastern Mediterranean, strung out like a necklace along the west and south-west coast of Asia Minor.

These are islands dripping with history and oozing with culture: Kos, where Hippocrates formulated the foundations of modern medicine; Patmos, where St John the Divine wrote the Book of Revelation; Kalimnos, Leros and Simi, with their neo-classical mansions; and Rhodes, where the giant Colossus once straddled the harbour of Mandhraki, holding aloft the flame of freedom that inspired the Statue of Liberty.

The casual freedom of land and sea, to hop from one island to the next, is part of the lure of a holiday in the sun in this part of Greece. But it’s a freedom that comes with a price, and a freedom valued by the local Greeks. At the crossroads of three continents, this island chain was once ruled by Alexander the Great and Ptolemy; it has been occupied by the Romans, the Crusaders, the Venetians, the Knights of St John, the Turks, the Italians and Nazi Germany. Only with the end of the second World War was it finally handed over by Britain and incorporated into the Greek state in 1947.

Today, only 26 of the Dodecanese islands are inhabited: the largest, Rhodes, has about 100,000 people, but most have only a few hundred residents or less, and there are only 79 people left on Pserimos.

The large Turkish minorities in Rhodes and Kos and the mosques and minarets still dotting the skylines of many islands are ever present reminders that Turkey occupied the Dodecanese for almost 400 years, from 1522 to 1912. Turkey is Greece’s nearest neighbour, and from many islands you can feel it’s almost possible to touch the Turkish coast with its harbours and towns, houses and hotels.

The fishermen and ferry operators supplement their income during these months with day trips from Rhodes to Marmaris, from Simi to Data, and from Kos to Bodrum, site of the ancient world’s Hallicarnassus and its Mausoleum.

On Saturdays and Sundays, the NV Nissos offers day trips to Turkey, leaving Kos at 9 a.m. and returning at 5 p.m. But as a small group of not more than two dozen journalists boarded the Nissos in Kos Harbour, close to the Plane Tree of Hippocrates and the Mosque of Hatzi Hassan, we were reminded of the ever-present fear of an invasion from Anatolia, five kilometres across the stretch of water: local people talk in terms of “when the Turks come”, not “if”.

With blue skies and blue seas, it could have been an idyllic summer trip. Apart from goat herds and environmentalists, few people ever bother to visit the more remote rocks off the coast of Kos, Kalimnos, Kalolimnos and Pserimos. The crew took down the sign reading “Turkey” as we sailed off for the islets of Imia or Limnia, two flat pancakes less than two miles from Kalolimnos, almost 2½ miles from the Turkish island of Cavus, and over three miles from the western-most Turkish coast on the peninsula of Bodrum.

The Greek naval frigate HS Limnos, which had taken part in operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, was fresh back from the Adriatic and had offered to take us out to look at the rocks. But before we left, Turkey protested and summoned the Greek ambassador in Ankara, Dimitrios Nezeritis, to warn against the media trip.

It was no idle warning – two days earlier, a Greek coastguard vessel and a Turkish patrol boat had collided in Greek waters, a mile south of Imia.

For more than 60 years, Turkey had accepted the maritime boundaries in the Aegean, defined by treaties and agreements with the Italians in 1923 and 1932, and ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1947. The boundaries were never challenged by Ankara until last December.

But as Turkey faced a major political crisis with the unexpected electoral success of the Islamic Welfare Party, the Foreign Ministry in Ankara claimed for the first time that Imia was part of the Turkish province of Mugla. Tension began to escalate and on January 27th Turkish journalists from the daily Hurriyet landed on the largest of the two Imia islets, tore down the blue and white Greek flag and hoisted the red and white star and crescent of Turkey.

Four days later, Turkish troops landed on the smaller rocky outcrop. The two countries were on the brink of war when President Clinton intervened and the Turkish troops withdrew.

The crisis was a temporary boost at home to Turkey’s Tansu Ciller as she searched (in vain) for a coalition partner to keep her in power. But it threatened to bring down the new Greek Prime Minister, Costas Simitis; his Foreign Minister, Theodoros Pangalos; and the Pasok government in Athens. Both sides agreed to withdraw their forces from the area around Imia and return to the status quo ante, although Ms Ciller continued to press Turkey’s claims to 3,000 Aegean islands – the sum total of all islands in Greek waters.

As we sailed out of Kos, the military tension was palpable and visible. Greek and Turkish jets buzzed overhead sporadically, a Greek coastguard vessel and a navy ship were within sight and, in the distance, we could catch a glimpse of a ship with Turkish naval markings.

Costas Bikas, the Foreign Ministry spokesman from Athens on board the Nissos, insisted there was nothing out of the ordinary about the cruise and it was none of Ankara’s business. But the Turks made it their business. As the Greek and Turkish jet fighters swooped low over the area, the Turkish foreign ministry took a group of foreign and local journalists out from Bodrum. Once again, there were new Turkish claims to the islets known to the Turks as Kardak – by Defence Minister Oltan Sunguklu and by naval spokesman Ali Kurunahmut, who told cruising journalists: “Kardak is a Turkish islet and we are in Turkish waters.”

Trailing both groups were reporters and camera crews from the Greek and Turkish press and television. The crisis had moved from territorial claims and counter claims to cruise and counter cruise for journalists in the Aegean. As Imia faded out of sight, we followed past Psenmos, Kalolimnos, Leros and Kalimnos, through the straits separating Kalimnos and Telendhos, into Pothia, the port harbour of Kalimnos – names that once tripped off the tongues of backpackers in the 1970s.

As we disembarked at the dockside in Pothia, the microphones and cameras crowded into our faces: the foreign media had become the message.

The rocky island of Kalimnos is famous for its traditional sponge fishing; its fame in the past rested on Homer’s reference in the Iliad to the ships from the “Kalyndian Islands” taking part in the Trojan wars. Today, war remains an ever-present threat to the peace of the islanders and their sponge fishers.

The Nissos returned to Kos to prepare for Sunday’s day trippers to Bodrum, and a launch from the Hellenic coastguard took us out from the harbour to the navy frigate Timnos, with its crew waiting to take us on to Rhodes. For four hours we watched the crew tracking Turkish moves in the Aegean sea and skies, before our odyssey came to an end and Rhodes came into sight with its medieval castles and palaces, mosques and minarets and three harbours.

Two deer stand at each end of Mandhrki where the Colossus once straddled the entrance to the harbour, with ships passing through its towering legs. A small tug, the Herakles, took us ashore, reminding us of the apt inscription that once graced Colossus, praising the lovely gift of unlettered freedom. “For to those who spring from the race of Herakles, dominion is a heritage both on land and sea.”

This feature was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 6 July 1996

Athens seeks EU interest in bringing peace to the Aegean

World View
Patrick Comerford

When the Tanaiste Mr Spring meets the Greek Foreign Minister, Mr Theodoros Pangalos, next Friday, his main efforts are likely to be directed at encouraging the Greeks to lift their veto on Meda, the Mediterranean Economic Development Aid programme being blocked by Athens because of proposals to include Turkey.

Meda involves 13 Mediterranean countries, but Greece is try ding to devise a formula so that all of them, except Turkey, receive the funds.

The two Greek priorities are the continuing territorial claims being made in the Aegean by Ankara, and Greek hopes that the Irish presidency will see a new initiative on Cyprus. The Cypriots have been promised that talks on the accession of Cyprus will open when the IGC concludes. They hope to become full members, along with Malta, by 1999 or 2000. There is intense speculation now that an Irish diplomat will be appointed as the EU's special negotiator on Cyprus.

Cyprus is still the key to Greek relations with Turkey, according to Professor Yannis Valinakis of the University of Athens, who said recently. “Progress in Cyprus would greatly facilitate Greek Turkish relations and contribute to the relaxation of regional tensions.” In recent days, the tension between Greece and Turkey has eased in the Aegean, with both sides agreeing to suspend naval manoeuvres this summer to avoid any clashes.

Mr Pangalos says Athens wants to suspend manoeuvres to avoid any incident with Turkey, and the Turkish Foreign Minister, Ms Tansu Ciller, says. “Our government believes that measures like this create an atmosphere conducive to solving the problems between Turkey and Greece.”

But Greek Turkish relations are at their lowest ebb since the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and Athens and Ankara recognise the tension could be damaging to tourism in both Greece and Turkey.

In Athens, Mr Spring will be meeting a more confident Mr Pangalos, whose position has been firmly consolidated since the Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, won a tough internal party battle to become president of the ruling Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok).

The prime minister’s two key allies in the party battle were Mr Pangalos and the Development Minister, Dr Vasso Papandreou, who can now expect promotion in a cabinet shuffle, possibly ahead of Mr Spring’s arrival. Both are experienced negotiators when it comes to European affairs: Ms Papandreou is a former social affairs commissioner, and Mr Pangalos was a tough negotiator as European affairs minister.

In recent weeks, Mr Pangalos has taken a tough stand against the multiplying Turkish claims. The Aegean neighbours came to the brink of open hostilities in January after a Turkish landing party took possession of the tiny islet of Imia. The claims have persisted since, with the Greeks demanding Ankara go to the International Court and the Turks demanding that Athens should agree to negotiations on the Turkish claims.

The Turks added to their claims at the beginning of the summer, when Ankara indicated it regarded the small island of Gavdos off the south coast of Crete and 400 km south-west of the Turkish coast as disputed territory or a “grey area”.

Last month, the Turkish daily Millyet identified three more “orphan islands” in the Dodecanese to join the growing list of islands regarded by the Turkish government as grey areas, Farmakonisi, Kalolimnos and Agathonisi.

The report said the Turkish Foreign Ministry would openly question Greek sovereignty on the islands if Greece exercised its right under the Law of the Sea Treaty to extend its territorial waters from six to 12 miles.

It is the view of Mr Simitis that Turkey openly disputes all legal documents and international treaties concerning Greek titles in the Aegean islands. This creates another source of for the region's stability. He beleives Turkey is openly disputing the Lausanne Treaty which settled the borders between Turkey and Greece in 1922.

At a Pasok party meeting in Patras, Mr Pangalos, known for his colourful turn of phrase, accused Turkey of Nazi like tactics in the Aegean and compared Turkey’s claims to the islands with Hitler’s claims to Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Gavdos has been part of the modern Greek state since Crete was incorporated into it in 1913. Any question mark over the status of Gavdos raises the spectre of Turkish claims to all Ottoman possessions prior to the outbreak of the first World War claims that could be devastating throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. But Turkey's claims to Imia and its attitude to the status of the Dodecanese islands of Farmakonisi, Kalolimnos and Agathonisi are equally absurd.

The Dodecanese were taken by Italy in 1912. Under the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, the Dodecanese were ceded to Greece along with Smyrna and part of the Anatolian hinterland, but the treaty was never ratified, and with the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 the islands were placed under Italian sovereignty.

The Italian administration attempted a forcible Latinisation of the people, and spoken Greek and Greek Orthodox observances were banned in public from 1920. But the Italians were in no doubt that the islands were part of Greece.

In 1932, Italy and Turkey signed two agreements on the delimitation of the maritime frontier between the Dodecanese and the Turkish coast.

The first agreement, on January 4th, sets down the exact maritime frontier between the Turkish coast and the island of Kastellorizo in the south east Dodecanese. The second agreement, on December 28th, 1932, marked the maritime frontier between the Turkish coast and the rest of the Dodecanese. Both sides immediately implemented the agreements and abided by their provisions.

The Germans troops who surrendered to the Greeks on the island of Symi on May 8th, 1945, were the last Germans to lay down their arms. As one commentator noted, in their surrender, even the Nazis recognised the Dodecanese as Greek. Under the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, the islands were formally transferred to Greek sovereignty.

Official maps of the Italian government in 1936, the official Turkish air and maritime navigation maps in 1953, and more recently maps from the US air force in 1994, the US Defence Mapping Agency, the Russian navy, the Turkish Foreign Ministry, the Turkish Geographical Service, and the EU’s Corine environmental programme all show Turkey’s acceptance of the 1932 agreements under which Imia, Farmakonisi, Kalolimnos and Agathonisi are marked clearly as Italian, and later Greek, territory.

Athens has been disappointed with the EU’s failure to support Greece against the Turkish claims. Mr Pangalos has argued that the release of EU aid to Turkey would encourage Turkish “expansionism”. Mr Simitis points out that Greece is the only European country facing an open threat against its territory not only in the Aegean but its entire borderline.

With the future of Ms Ciller’s coalition pact with Mr Necmettin Erbakan and his Islamic Welfare Party now precarious and dependent on the far-right ultra nationalist Grand Unity Party, she is in no position as foreign minister to climb down in the Aegean.

Despite her concessions on manoeuvres this week, we could, in the words of Mr Pangalos last month, be facing a long hot summer in the Aegean, and Mr Spring may make no progress on changing minds in Athens about Meda.

This news analysis feature was first published in The Irish Times on 6 July 1996