Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has come out with another bombastic speech to distract Turks from the declining economic situation and made mention to the Byzantine Empire.
"We will take whatever it is entitled to in the Mediterranean, Aegean and Black seas, we will not make any concessions," Erdoğan said today at a commemoration ceremony of the Seljuks' Manzikert Victory in 1071.
The Battle of Manzikert saw the Byzantine's lose to the Seljuk Turks after Emperor Romanos IV was betrayed by Andronikos Doukas, who withdrew more then half the army during the battle.
The Doukas family were court rivals with the Emperor, and Andronikos commanded the rearguard of the army during the battle of Manzikert. Andronikos had announced the fake news that Romanos IV had been killed during battle and left the battlefield, being immortalized in history as the reason for the Byzantine's being defeated.
None-the-less, for Turkey, this is considered a historic event as for the first time in history the Turkic tribes of Central Asia could access the plains of Anatolia.
"If it [Greece] wants to pay a price, let them come and face us. If they don't have the courage for it, they should stand out of our way," Erdoğan continued to say to raise ultra-nationalistic rhetoric to distract the population from his policies that have caused a spectacularly economic decline in Turkey.
"Greece, who is unworthy of even the Byzantine legacy, refuses to take lessons from history and acts like a fake bully in the Mediterranean," the Turkish president concluded.
Credit ratings agency Fitch lowered its outlook on Turkish sovereign debt to “negative” from “stable” on Friday citing the central bank’s depleted foreign currency reserves and low interest rates. It rates the debt at a junk 'BB-'.
Turkey’s lira briefly hit a record low on Wednesday as concerns among investors over the economy and political and military tensions with neighbouring Greece weighed on sentiment, Ahval reported.
The lira weakened to as low as 7.418 per dollar in morning trading in Istanbul. It traded down 0.1 percent at 7.397 per dollar at 10:06 a.m. local time, extending losses this year to almost 20 percent.
