The obstreperous and much publicised presence of U.S. President Donald Trump during the NATO summit in Brussels last week has given us plenty of thoughts.
Unless there is a last-minute change in the official guest list, no member from the Greek government is due to attend this evening’s official inauguration ceremony of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The anxiety of Greeks has been relieved after the conclusion of the presidential race in the first round and the relatively uncomplicated completion of the parliamentary elections.
After months of negotiations, Alexis Tsipras and his counterpart Zoran Zaev, were able to sign a deal to end up a bitter dispute on the name of Greece’s northern neighbor: The deal was signed on June 17 on the shores of Lake Prespa by the two prime ministers and the foreign ministers of these two countries, thus putting an end to a dispute that has marred their relations for almost three decades. They agreed on a new and finite name for the republic which is now going to be called “Republic of Northern Macedonia.”
Like “fake news,” the concept of “overtourism” has started to creep into our language. Although still in their “teething” stage, these two terms need time to be described fully in dictionaries. But their impact is already strongly felt in our life and they are certainly here to stay.
If Turkey is Greece’s neighbor separated by a sea, so is Italy. They both belong to the inner circle of the EU, the Eurozone, but they have recently been sharing similarly serious problems:
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rally in Sarajevo—the only one to be held in Europe—ahead of the snap Turkish parliamentary and presidential elections has drawn a lot of attention among local and international media. Yet, the Turkish president also had other business in Sarajevo, which involved holding talks with Bakir Izetbekovic, the Muslim member of the three-member Bosnian Presidential Council. The purpose of the talks were to promote bilateral relations between Turkey and Bosnia in view of the recent developments in the Balkans.
This afternoon a group from the European Parliament, headed by the MEP for the Greek New Democracy Party Manolis Kefaloyiannis, will be visiting the two Greek soldiers detained in an Edirne high security prison since March 2 for illegally crossing the border into Turkey.
It took no more than three days for Musa Alerik, the driver of a construction machine in the Edirne Municipality, to return from the Orestiada prison on the Greek side of the border to his family in Edirne. He had been arrested on May 2 by Greek border guards when he accidentally, as he stated, entered Greek territory after making a wrong turn while maneuvering his excavator and crossed the border into Greece.
