Athens serves Turkey demarche

With concern mounting over a recent spike in Turkish transgressions, Greece's Foreign Ministry on Tuesday handed Turkish Ambassador in Athens Burak Ozugergin a demarche in protest at the harassment on Monday by fighter jets of the helicopter transporting Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to the eastern Aegean island of Agathonisi to attend an event marking the anniversary of Greece's 1821 uprising against Ottoman rule.

The incident occurred just days after the Greek and Turkish foreign ministers, Giorgos Katrougalos and Mevlut Cavusoglu, agreed that delegations from both countries would meet to discuss confidence-building measures based on an accord signed in 1988 between Greece's Karolos Papoulias and his counterpart Mesut Yilmaz.

On the same day, which is also a religious holiday in Greece, Turkish jets also violated Greek national airspace 47 times in the eastern...