While international attention is focused on Turkey’s Syrian border, the Turkish people are focused on their other border, the one with Greece. They watched closely July 5 as the Greek people voted no to the European bailout program.

The fact that the Turks felt compassion toward their Greek neighbors is ironic given the bitterness of their relations (at times bordering on going to war) in the last decades of the 20th century.

The destinies of these neighboring countries seemingly were sealed together. They both were the recipients of the Marshall Plan in the wake of World War II. They became NATO members simultaneously in 1952. They were the first two countries that signed association agreements with the then European Economic Community (EEC) that came into being by the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Greece signed it in 1961 and Turkey in 1963.

Their entry to the European Union (EU) was expected to be simultaneous, too. However, in 1974, the Cyprus question culminated in Turkish military intervention, which cut the island into Turkish and Greek halves. This destroyed the relationship between the two countries for the next 20 years. A number of problems other than Cyprus surfaced, ranging from disputes over the continental shelf of the Aegean Sea, territorial waters, the Flight Information Region over the Aegean international airspace, etc. Skirmishes between the navies of these NATO allies in Aegean waters and confrontation of their air forces at the brink of dogfights in the Aegean air space became routine.