As part of his neo-Ottoman and Blue Homeland plans, Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan is renaming the Aegean Sea in order not to reference the Greek origins of the name.
Speaking recently at a congress of the ruling AKP party, Erdoğan called the Aegean the “Sea of Islands” (Adalar Denizi).
The idea behind the name behind is the well-known great theorist of the failed “Blue Homeland” and former head of the General Staff of the Turkish Navy, Cihat Yaycı.
Last July, the beginning of a new crisis with Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean , the head of the Naval and Strategic Studies Center of the private Bahçeşehir Istanbul University set for the first time on renaming the Aegean as the “Sea of Islands.”
They also considered using North Mediterranean.
He also considered proposing a change of the homonymous geographical district, one of seven of the country, to Western Anatolia.
“Turkey should not use the word ‘Aegean’ which has Greek roots,” he had specifically argued.
Since then, all the maps and graphs that Yaycı presents in his analyses refer to the Aegean Sea as the “Sea of Islands.”
Yaycı had publicly claimed, after the catastrophic earthquake on Samos last October, that the incident proves that the islands of the Aegean Sea belong to the… Turkish continental shelf.
“This painful earthquake in the ‘Sea of Islands’ confirmed once again that Greek islands like Samos, located near the Turkish coast, belong to the Turkish continental shelf,” he said.
“This is proof that mainland Greece was not affected by the earthquake, on the other hand, Smyrna (Σμύρνα, Turkish: İzmir) suffered serious damage,” he said at the time, prompting a variety of comments.
More and more Turkish officials and media in the neighboring country are using the term “Sea of Islands” when they want to refer to the Aegean Sea.
It is recalled that the architect of the theory of the “Blue Homeland” (Mavi Vatan in Turkish), Vice Admiral Yaycı, formulated his views on maps published in his book “The concept of Exclusive Economic Zone, questions and answers.”
In this book, the new view is developed that the Turkish Exclusive Economic Zone is tangent to that of Libya, disappearing Crete and the influence of all the Greek islands.
In his latest book, Yaycı made his claims that Greece illegally owning 23 islands, including Lemnos, Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Rhodes, Kos, Leros and Patmos!
Yaycı builds on this false theory that Greece is violating the obligation to demilitarise the Aegean islands, meaning that students of the Turkish military academies will take over the command of the armed forces of the neighboring country in the future with this idea.
READ MORE: Turkish claims on demilitarising the Aegean Islands via Treaty of Lausanne are fake: Here’s why.
