Eastern Mediterranean

Turkey on Aug. 26 is marking the anniversary of a battle nearly a millennium ago, a conflict that reverberates deeply in the soil of Anatolia and world history even many centuries later.

An ambitious mass tree planting project has started in Cyprus. The initiative has been taken as part of the fight against climate change, which is already seriously affecting and threatening the Mediterranean island.

Syrian refugees make valuable contributions to communities across Turkey, said the country's presidential communications director late on Aug. 24. 

The Turkish government provides millions of Syrians with health care and education and a multilateral political solution is needed and demonizing Ankara won't help, wrote Turkey's Presidential Communications Director Fahrettin Altun in an article he penned for Foreign Policy magazine on Aug. 24.

Not only is Turkey continuing its activities in the wider region around Cyprus, but it has declared that it is scaling them up by sending another research vessel to the area. Such a development is not particularly surprising, as Turkey has for many years expressed in several ways the importance of the Eastern Mediterranean in general, and of Cyprus in particular, to its interests.

Turkey, which holds 4.6% of the global contractor market, continues to be the world's second-biggest contractor, according to a report by a U.S.-based magazine. 

Officials from Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) took an inspection tour to closed Varosha, an abandoned city in the northern part of the divided island of Cyprus, on Aug. 23.

A former member of Turkey's special underwater forces team (SAT) who was deployed on Imia during the 1996 standoff that brought Greece and Turkey to the brink of war has been appointed commander of one of the most important naval bases in the eastern Mediterranean, according to reports.

Some 7,197 companies were established in Turkey in July, marking an annual and monthly rise, the county's top trade union revealed on Aug. 23.

Turkey's president on Aug. 22 welcomed new envoys to the capital Ankara from Indonesia, Philippines, Iraq, and Mali.