By Handan Kazanci
ISTANBUL
When a cataclysmic earthquake, claiming more than 18,000 lives, hit northwestern Turkey (the cities include Adapazari, Kocaeli, Yalova, Istanbul, Duzce) fifteen years ago, August 17 1999, one of the first rescue teams to come to the country was from Greece, Turkey's nemesis throughout history.
Around three weeks later, it was Turkey's turn to help its neighbor when Athens was hit by another damaging earthquake on September 7.
The back-to-back natural disasters sparked a rapprochement process between the two historically hostile nations, says associate professor on Turkish-Greek relations Dimitrios Triantaphyllou.
Greece and Turkey share an intertwined history as the two countries both gained their independence by fighting against each other.
Greece gained it by rebelling against the Ottoman Empire in 1820s while Turkey had to combat occupant Greece forces - among others - during the First World War to later become independent.
Decades of disputes have followed and marred Greek-Turkish relations, culminating in the conflict over the island of Cyprus when a Greek-inspired coup in 1974 was met by a Turkish peace mission to aid Turkish Cypriots in the north of the island.
In 1996, both countries came to the brink of war over two uninhabited islets in the eastern Aegean Sea.
But three years later, they were helping each other out over the August 1999 earthquake, which seemingly drastically improved their bilateral relations.
Indeed, a mere four month later, in December 1999, Greece put an end to its systematic veto of Turkey's EU membership candidacy at a meeting of the European Council in Helsinki.
In 2001, Greece and Turkey even made a united bid to host the UEFA Euro 2008 in football.
And, in 2004, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Athens, the first such visit of a high-ranking official in 16 years. Four years later, Greek Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis reciprocated and visited Turkey. It had been 49 years since a Greek prime minister had set foot on Turkish.
The rapprochement also improved the trade between the two countries. Turkey's exports to Greece amounted to roughly $236,500 in 1996. In 2002, they had more than doubled, reaching approximately $590,400 according to data from Turkey's Foreign Economic Relations Board.
"People take it for granted. People assume it has always been like this, this is not [the case]," says associate professor Dimitrios Triantaphyllou, who has been living in Istanbul for the last four years.
"I think before the earthquake I could not conceive of someone like myself teaching full-time at a Turkish university," he says. Long gone are the 1955 attacks in Istanbul (also known as September 6-7 incidents) on Greek minority groups, which, as a result, led them to massively leave the country.
Mustafa Aydin, a professor on international relations and rector of Istanbul's Kadir Has University believes the earthquakes didn't really have an effect on the rapprochement process, as the two countries had already begun talking before 1999.
Before the earthquake, the then Turkish Foreign Minister Ismail Cem and the then Greek FM George Papandreou had already met numerous times.
Indeed, the two countries, both members of NATO, each had reasons for a rapprochement. On one hand, Greece was trying to be a member of the eurozone and needed to decrease its military expenses. This could only happen by improving relations with Turkey, its main threat in the region.
Turkey, on the other hand, wanted to be part of the European Union, to which hostile relations with Greece constituted a considerable obstacle.
Still, Aydin grants that the earthquake did transform public opinion, if not policy between the two nations, which had already begun to change,
When the Turkish rescue team was in Greece, they saw that Turks were not actually 'evil' and that they could help, Aydin adds.
According to Triantaphyllou, Greek and Turkish people helped tremendously to push the political elite to proceed with normalizing relations.
Despite relations between both countries having dramatically improved, tensions remain. There are lingering disputes over unresolved delimitations in the Aegean Sea.
And the island of Cyprus is still divided in two, as if separated by a fault line.
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