Seas

Athens plans to present a package of proposals to ease Aegean tensions in talks with Ankara on confidence building measures on February 17-21.

Turkish fighter jets carried out a fresh round of overflights over the Aegean on Wednesday morning.
In particular, at 10.03 a.m. a pair of F-16s flew over the southeastern island of Farmakonisi at 23,000 feet.
The aircraft conducted another overflight at 10.08 a.m. over Lipsoi at 8,500 feet and, four minutes later, over Agathonisi at an even lower altitude of 7,000 feet.

Turkish security forces on Feb. 10 held 168 irregular migrants attempting to cross into Europe through the country's Aegean Balikesir province and northwestern Edirne province, state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

Deputy Defense Minister Alkiviadis Stefanis said migration is a "matter of national security" and is being handled as such, while expressing support for a plan to install a floating barrier in the Aegean Sea to prevent migrant boats from entering Greece's waters.

A total of 41,112 vessels passed through Turkey's Bosphorus Strait in 2019, according to official data.

The number of vessels using the strait was unchanged with the previous year's figures of 41,103, the country's Transportation and Infrastructure Ministry announced.

Following criticism by Amnesty International and other human rights groups, the government on Friday continued to defend its plan for a floating barrier in the Aegean to curb an increased influx of migrants from Turkey as the European Commission and Germany appeared to distance themselves from the scheme.

The notion that the refugee/migration crisis can be dealt with in some way by installing a barrier in the sea is really nothing more than wishful thinking.

The German government has only heard from reports of the Greek government's plans for a floating fence to secure its maritime borders against migration and does not wish to make any comment, German government spokesperson Steffen Seibert said on Friday.

Seibert pointed to a statement by the European Commission on this issue, noting that it came under its purview.

The Benaki Museum's Pireos Street annex presents "From Homer's World: Tinos and the Cyclades in the Mycenaean Age," an exhibition of finds from a Mycenaean tomb discovered at Agia Thekla on the island of Tinos that is one of just three such funerary monuments known in the Cyclades.

Greece's Foreign Ministry on Thursday rejected arguments by Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar that Athens is allegedly violating international law by not demilitarizing 16 of its islands, saying Ankara's concern on legality is "hypocritical."

Akar said Greece's arming 16 out of 23 islands with "non-military status" is in violation of agreements in the Aegean sea.