By Murat Yıldız
On November 7, 2026, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told Kathimerini that "everything is normal, everything is fine" when asked about the latest dispute over the Great Sea Interconnector (GSI), the planned electricity link between Greece and the Republic of Cyprus.
Turkish diplomatic sources separately told the newspaper that the disagreement over navigational warnings, or NAVTEX notices, had been resolved. Greek diplomatic sources responded that Greece remained the sole authority responsible for licensing the survey work. No joint statement explained what had been settled, and neither government had withdrawn its maritime claims. The French-flagged Abeille Marengo was expected to begin its survey operations after leaving Crete on November 9.
I recognized the sequence. On September 29, I published Parallel Monologues: Fidan, Gerapetritis, and the Illusion of Dialogue, examining how Ankara and Athens could praise dialogue while assigning different purposes to it. Six days later, in Charlatanism: How Greek-Turkish Disputes Became a Fear Market, I wrote about the proposed distinction between notifying Ankara and seeking authorization from Athens before renewed cable surveys.
The wording allowed for practical coordination without settling either country's legal claims. I cautioned against declaring victory or surrender before a vessel had moved. The November statements followed the same logic: Ankara described the immediate difficulty as resolved, while Athens insisted its authority had never been compromised. Whether any operational accommodation exists remains unconfirmed, and the vessel's actual movements will matter more than the declarations made on its behalf.
I have watched variations of this exchange for decades. Governments and ministers change, and the disputes take on new dimensions as energy projects or regional security concerns move to the foreground. The machinery for managing the tension remains familiar. I think of a revolving door: a confrontation draws the two governments inside, negotiations turn, and they emerge into calmer air, each carrying home much the same position with which it entered.
Soon enough, another dispute sets the door turning again. There is a word for the habit that has grown around it, and Turks and Greeks happen to share that word.
Tembel
In Turkish, tembel means lazy. The Greek τεμπέλης, pronounced tempélis, has the same meaning. According to the Triantafyllidis Dictionary, the Greek word came through Turkish, with an older Persian origin. It is one among thousands of reminders of the two societies' intertwined history.
I am not describing every Turkish or Greek diplomat as idle. I have known people in both foreign services who work extraordinarily hard, often keeping potentially dangerous incidents from becoming worse. My criticism is directed at the political and diplomatic system in which they operate, and at the increasingly comfortable assumption that keeping a negotiation alive is itself an adequate result.
The evidence is uncomfortable. On April 10, 2025, Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis acknowledged that 64 rounds of exploratory contacts over 22 years had failed to produce progress towards agreement on maritime delimitation. In his judgment, the situation had actually deteriorated. The same minister has argued that the more recent, structured dialogue has brought tangible gains in other areas, including migration, security and travel. Both assessments deserve to be heard.
Türkiye and Greece have expanded cooperation in tourism, trade and other practical fields since 1999. The short-stay visa arrangements that have brought Turkish visitors to several Greek islands are welcome. They are achievements, yet they cannot be offered indefinitely as evidence that the central maritime and airspace disagreements are approaching resolution.
Diplomatic laziness is the point at which managing an unresolved problem becomes more comfortable than trying to resolve it.
A succession of unsuccessful talks does not, on its own, prove laziness. The legal positions are genuinely different, domestic politics restrict what leaders can concede, and security calculations can make compromise expensive. The charge becomes justified as a criticism of the system when governments treat those limitations as permanent and measure success by the number of meetings rather than by what the meetings accomplish.
An Idea From 1974
A declassified American diplomatic telegram offers a useful test of that criticism. On July 4, 1974, NATO Secretary General Joseph Luns convened six allied ambassadors in Brussels because he feared an Aegean dispute between Türkiye and Greece could lead to conflict. He wanted to address the problem gradually, setting aside the larger legal questions, the minorities issue and Cyprus for the time being.
Luns intended to suggest that the two countries form joint companies to exploit potential oil and mineral resources in the Aegean. The respective shares and the companies' other terms could be negotiated later. His proposal was designed to leave Greece's asserted legal rights intact while giving Türkiye a reasonable share of resources off its coastline.
The document records an intention, not a completed agreement. Luns was concerned that Athens might regard NATO involvement as an attempt to impose a solution, and he planned discreet preliminary contacts. Nothing in this telegram establishes that the governments accepted the proposal or that it was ready for signature.
Still, its central idea was clear: there might be economic cooperation before full legal agreement.
On September 29, 1976, Turkish Foreign Minister İhsan Sabri Çağlayangil discussed a similar possibility with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in New York. The official American record shows that Ankara favoured joint exploration in some parts of the Aegean, separate arrangements in others, or a wider joint exploration scheme excluding island territorial waters. Kissinger doubted the Greeks would accept the broader proposal, particularly because the two countries disagreed on how islands affected continental-shelf rights.
The disagreement extended even to defining the area that might be developed jointly. It was a substantial obstacle, and the record makes that clear. Yet ministers were discussing a way to explore possible resources without first completing the delimitation of the entire continental shelf.
The idea was still circulating during the Turkish-Greek rapprochement associated with İsmail Cem and George Papandreou. On September 23, 2000, the Athens News Agency reported that former Greek minister Stefanos Manos had renewed his 1988 suggestion that Türkiye and Greece jointly exploit Aegean oil. Speaking at a bilateral political and economic symposium in Athens, he argued that the prospect deserved study.
Manos was not negotiating on behalf of the Greek government. Nor does the surviving public record establish that the two foreign ministries formally adopted his proposal. But it is difficult to read these accounts from 1974, 1976 and 2000 without wondering why a common approach to resource development never matured into a durable framework.
I would not claim that commercially recoverable deposits have been established in the disputed areas, or that a joint enterprise would necessarily succeed. Even the boundaries of a shared development zone would be controversial. The investment, revenues, legal safeguards and distribution of benefits would all require careful work. That is precisely the work a government ought to authorize when an opportunity presents itself.
If earlier administrations seriously examined such options and rejected them, we should know what made them unworkable. If they did not examine them, that too deserves an explanation. Fifty years of intermittent ideas and recurring disputes should have produced a more substantial public accounting than another promise to keep talking.
The Opening of 1999
There was a period when the political imagination of the two countries appeared capable of more. In October 1930, Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos travelled to Türkiye to pursue reconciliation with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The war in Anatolia was still within living memory, and the governments had spent years confronting the consequences of the population exchange. Yet they negotiated practical settlements and signed a treaty of friendship, neutrality, conciliation and arbitration. In January 1934, Venizelos nominated Atatürk for the Nobel Peace Prize.
We should resist making 1930 a golden age. Several of today's maritime disputes developed in their modern form much later. What the rapprochement established was the possibility of political decisions that changed the direction of a relationship despite the recent experience of war.
I remember a different opening in 1999. İsmail Cem and George Papandreou had begun improving relations before the earthquakes in Türkiye and Greece. When the disasters struck, the response of ordinary people changed the public atmosphere. Greek rescuers came to Türkiye, and Turkish teams helped in Greece. I remember how deeply that solidarity was appreciated.
Cem and Papandreou made use of the moment. Cooperation expanded in trade, tourism and culture, and the improvement in bilateral relations contributed to the atmosphere surrounding Türkiye's European Union candidacy. Their achievements were real. My disappointment concerns the distance between that exceptional public goodwill and the limited movement on the disputes most likely to produce another crisis.
A joint Aegean resource project would have been politically difficult, perhaps impossible. But the alternative had been discussed for decades, and the public climate was unusually favourable. The ministers could not have guaranteed success, nor could they alone have authorized every concession. The political leaders of both countries, however, had a rare opportunity to find out whether the idea could move beyond the symposium and the diplomatic memorandum.
The opening passed. The hardest questions remained.
Cyprus and the Interests That Endure
Cyprus shaped my understanding of this pattern long before the latest cable dispute. In the spring of 2004, while studying at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, I was writing my master's thesis on the political history of the Turkish Cypriot community since British occupation.
One of our professors, who had been involved in the Annan Plan process, brought a draft into a seminar room. I remember the blue-and-white file. Before opening it, I asked him one question.
Are the British leaving?
He said no. I handed the file back.
I described that exchange in my August 2026 essay, Are the British Leaving?, including the qualification that my original reaction required. Britain had offered to relinquish 45 square miles, approximately 117 square kilometres, of its Sovereign Base Areas if a comprehensive settlement was accepted. The offer was substantial, but the land contained no essential military infrastructure, and the British government said the transfer would not impair the bases' operations.
For me, the point was the preservation of the strategic function. The two Cypriot communities were being asked to reconsider constitutional arrangements, territory, political authority and security guarantees. Britain supported the United Nations process and offered territory, while making clear which of its own interests would remain protected.
That does not prove London wanted permanent division. Its military facilities could continue under a comprehensive settlement, and Britain's territorial offer was a genuine concession. Yet the contrast raises an enduring question about whose established arrangements are treated as negotiable and whose are protected from the outset.
My research into British colonial policy examined how outside interests and competing national aspirations contributed to the political separation of the two communities. The decades since have produced further institutions, political constituencies and strategic relationships around the island's unresolved status. Some actors gain authority or security from the existing arrangements, even while ordinary Cypriots continue to carry much of the cost.
The existence of beneficiaries cannot establish that all of them oppose a settlement. It does help explain why a political order can survive repeated negotiations aimed at replacing it.
The Inheritance
I have often thought of Türkiye and Greece as two children arguing over a family inheritance. The father dies, the children disagree about what belongs to each of them, and their descendants inherit an argument they never chose to begin.
In my metaphor, the father is Anatolia. The name Anadolu itself comes from the Greek anatolē. I am referring to a historical world the two societies have shared in different ways, rather than asking either country to adopt the other's national history.
Greece gained independence through a struggle against Ottoman rule. The Turkish Republic emerged from its own national struggle during the collapse of that imperial world. The circumstances were different, and neither country's history can be reduced to the other's. They also have painful memories that deserve equal seriousness: Greeks driven from or forced to leave homes in Anatolia, and Turks and other Ottoman Muslims killed or displaced in the Balkans. The population exchange carried further losses into families on both sides of the Aegean.
I have no interest in ranking those sufferings. I spent years living and studying in Greece and have friendships there that I regard as family. I know how much of the relationship survives beyond the language of official disputes. Two societies that share words, food, music and everyday habits are capable of recognizing one another without first settling every argument over history.
Such familiarity cannot determine a continental-shelf boundary. It can, however, support a political ambition to share practical benefits while leaving the hardest legal questions to a longer process. The idea should not be dismissed merely because its execution would be difficult.
The Comfort of the Status Quo
There are incentives for keeping the present routine intact. A leader who proposes compromise risks accusations of surrender; a leader who rejects it may be praised for firmness. Diplomatic institutions can point to the prevention of an incident, and their political superiors can announce another meeting. The public is rarely told which substantive options were rejected or why.
The media has its own rewards. In Charlatanism, I examined how a serious jurisdictional argument can be sold as the opening scene of a war. The survey vessel becomes a threat, the navigational notice a national humiliation, and technical language is turned into a judgment of who has defeated whom. Such coverage can be profitable without improving anyone's understanding of the dispute.
Greece has legitimate security concerns and has undertaken extensive military modernization. Türkiye has maritime and regional interests that require serious examination. Ankara's non-participation in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea does not automatically invalidate every Turkish claim, just as making a claim cannot establish jurisdiction in Türkiye's favour. A journalist should be able to read each side's position without treating it as a legal verdict.
The dangers are real. The events in Cyprus in 1974 and the 1996 Kardak / Imia confrontation are reminders that restraint can fail, or come dangerously close to failing. Keeping communication open between two NATO allies is valuable, and no responsible account of this relationship should pretend otherwise.
But the ability to avert confrontation cannot become the final measure of diplomatic achievement. After decades of practice in lowering the temperature, the governments ought to be able to tell their citizens what they have attempted to do about the causes of the next crisis.
The Revolving Door
The GSI dispute has brought us back to a familiar place. Türkiye challenged the Greek NAVTEX in waters it claims as part of its continental shelf. Greek authorities maintained their power to authorize the surveys. Turkish diplomatic sources then said the immediate difficulty had been resolved, without publicly explaining the operational terms of that outcome.
The statements did not establish an agreement on maritime boundaries, and the survey vessel's future conduct could still expose further disagreement. There is no need to invent a secret bargain to recognize a recurring diplomatic pattern.
That pattern was the subject of my September and October analyses. I take professional satisfaction in testing what I wrote before the event against what has happened since. It is one of the obligations, and pleasures, of journalism. I would take far greater satisfaction in watching the governments finally escape the routine.
They have capable diplomats, a history of reconciliation and proposals that deserve more serious attention than another carefully drafted pledge to maintain dialogue. Political leaders have learned to bring crises under control. Their harder responsibility is to make fewer of them necessary.
In Turkish, tembel. In Greek, τεμπέλης.
We have shared the word for generations. It would be worth finding something better to share.
Sources: US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (July 4, 1974; September 29, 1976), Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs (April 10, 2025), Athens News Agency (September 23, 2000), League of Nations Treaty Series (1930), UK Parliament (February–March 2003), Kathimerini (November 7, 2026), Greek Language Centre, Bosphorus News review and reporting.