ISTANBUL: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday begins the first visit by a Turkish head of state to Greece in 65 years, seeking progress on disputes that still bedevil ties that have proved relatively robust over the past two decades.

With Turkey’s bid to join the EU at a standstill and relations with much of the West frigid, Erdogan’s trip will be only his second bilateral visit to an EU member following the 2016 failed coup after talks in Poland this October.

Then Turkish president Celal Bayar visited Greece in 1952, the same year the two countries simultaneously joined Nato with strong American backing.

“Erdogan’s visit can be seen as part of the long phase of rapprochement between the two countries that began in 1999,” Dimitrios Triantaphyllou, director of the Centre for International and European Studies at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, said.

But he added that while Greek Turkish relations can be seen as “relatively robust”, none of a whole range of outstanding issues between the two sides have been resolved.

“Beyond the pragmatism, a wide divide exists between the two countries,” he said.

Erdogan visited Greece twice -- as prime minister in 2004 and 2010 -- building on a rapprochement between Ankara and Athens that truly began in earnest in 1999 when destructive earthquakes struck both countries within weeks.

Turkey and Greece have uneasy relations dating back to the creation of the modern Turkish Republic out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.

But Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which came to power in 2002, sought a more pragmatic relationship based on trade and tourism, and Greece became a key backer of the Turkish bid to join the EU.

“While over the last decades economic cooperation and commercial and tourist ties between the two countries have been very active, their relations still get stuck on the same differences,” said Jean Marcou, professor at Sciences Po Grenoble and associate researcher at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies.

The president’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said Turkey had “deep” relations with Greece and applauded Athens’ support for the embattled Turkish EU membership bid.

He confirmed Erdogan will first go to Athens to meet President Prokopis Pavlopoulos and then go to the northeastern Thrace region, home to Greece’s main Muslim minority.

Agence France-Presse