Athens slams French newspaper for displaying Greek islands as … Turkish!
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Greece complained to French newspaper Le Monde after it published a map of Turkey’s election results which showed a number of Greek islands as Turkish territory.
The map, which appeared on the English version of Le Monde’s website Monday, showed the Greek islands of Chios, Samos, Ikaria, Kos, Ios, Amorgos and Rhodes as having voted for Turkish opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in Sunday’s election.
According to two officials in the Greek foreign ministry, Greece’s ambassador to Paris, Dimitrios Zevelakis, wrote a letter to the newspaper’s publishers, calling on them to remove the map, which noted Turkish state-run news agency Anadolu as its source.
Le Monde has since removed the map from its website.
Despite being NATO allies, neighboring Greece and Turkey have been at odds for decades over a number of bilateral disputes, including maritime boundaries, Cyprus and overlapping claims to their continental shelves.
Even though Aegean tensions briefly calmed after devastating earthquakes hit Turkey earlier this year, Ankara has kept up its rhetoric against Greece amid what it sees as a growing military buildup on the Greek Aegean islands, close to Turkey’s coastline — the ones that appeared in Le Monde’s graphic as Turkish territory.
In a repeated, thinly veiled threat, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said: “We can come down suddenly one night when the time comes.”
Greece has national elections on Sunday, while the second round of Turkey’s presidential elections will take place on May 28.