The Greek-Turkish Dispute

Abstract

Both Greece and Turkey are desperately trying to protect themselves against each other and yet both recognize that their security is intertwined with that of the entire Balkan region. Nevertheless, the historical relationship between the two peoples, at times, appears to have trapped each state into a type of destructive zero-sum game. The Greeks and the Turks first came into contact in 576, and they have had a long history of hard-fought conflict especially since the Turkish landing in Gallipoli in 1356. Among the most violent ones were the conquest of Constantinople by Mohammed the Second in 1453, the Greek War of Independence 1821–9, and, the three successive Turkish-Greek Wars of 1879, 1912–13, and 1917–22. Territorial changes in the twentieth century, moreover, left a long legacy of bitterness. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed on 10 August 1920, awarded all of the Aegean Islands as well as Oriental Thrace and Izmir to Greece. But the warfare that followed during the next few years drove the Greeks out of Asia Minor.