Turkey FM starts Greece trip with visit to Muslim minority

KOMOTINI: Turkey's foreign minister on Sunday began a trip to Greece with a visit to the Muslim minority in Thrace, one of several sources of tension between the two countries.

"In Greece to meet members of Turkish Minority in Western Thrace and discuss our bilateral relations", Mevlut Cavusoglu tweeted as soon as he touched down at the airport in Alexandroupolis.

Cavusoglu visited a school in the northeastern region close to Greece's borders with Turkey and Bulgaria, as well as a village and the Turkish consulate, where he met with representatives of the minority.

"I emphasized that we will always stand resolutely with the Turkish Minority in their struggle for their rights and underlined once again our strong support", he tweeted afterwards.

Cavusoglu is due to meet Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis as well as Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias in Athens on Monday.

Cavusoglu had previously said the aim of his visit was to prepare for a bilateral meeting between Mitsotakis and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a NATO summit in Brussels on June 14.

While the Greek media said Cavusoglu's visit was a "test" of how his meetings would go in Athens, the Greek government tried to downplay any significance of the Thrace trip.

"The visit in Thrace is a private visit. Greece is an open, democratic country that does not forbid private visits. As far as the (Thrace) minority is concerned, it is enjoying a status of equality," Greek government spokeswoman Aristotelia Peloni said on Thursday.

The status of Greece's Muslim minority in Thrace is one of several points of contention between the two NATO allies.

Some 150,000 multiethnic Muslims in Thrace were given minority status in Greece after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which ended a war between Greece and Turkey.

Turkey has often claimed that Greece fails to take care of the rights of the minority, many of whom are of Turkish descent and Turkish-speaking.

During a heated press conference in Ankara in mid-April, Cavusoglu raised the issue with his counterpart Dendias.

"You don't allow the Turkish minority (in Greece) to call themselves Turkish. You call them Muslims," he said.

"If they call themselves Turkish, they are Turkish -- you have to recognise this."

Another point of contention between the neighbours is Byzantine heritage inside Turkey, after Ankara's move last year to convert the revered Hagia Sophia cathedral from a museum into a mosque sparked fury from Athens.

Relations between Greece and Turkey also plunged last year during a face-off over a wealth of energy deposits in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.