A narrative is spreading across Turkish social media comparing the Aegean islands to Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish-admi...

A narrative is spreading across Turkish social media comparing the Aegean islands to Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish-administered territories on the North African coast, with accounts arguing that if those are "colonies," then the Greek islands in the Aegean are too. The comparison falls apart quickly under historical scrutiny. The Aegean islands have been continuously inhabited by Greek-speaking populations for over three thousand years, long before the Ottoman Empire, let alone the modern Turkish state, existed. Cities like Mytilene, Chios, and Rhodes were centers of Greek civilization in antiquity, their Greek character unbroken through Byzantine rule and even through centuries of Ottoman occupation. The Turkish state itself traces its origins to the Seljuk and later Ottoman conquest of Anatolia, a region that was home to millions of Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians before successive waves of expulsion, massacre, and forced population transfer. The Greek population of Anatolia, once numbering in the millions, was largely destroyed or expelled through events including the 1914-1923 genocide of Pontic Greeks, the Smyrna catastrophe of 1922, and the compulsory population exchange of 1923. The Dodecanese, the last of the major Aegean island chains to formally return to Greece, did so in 1947 after Italian occupation, not as a colonial acquisition but as a reunification of a Greek-populated territory with the Greek state. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and subsequent agreements have defined these borders under international law. The framing of Greek sovereignty over the Aegean as "colonial" mirrors a broader pattern of revisionist claims circulating in Turkish state-aligned media and online spaces, which Greek and Cypriot officials have repeatedly pushed back against in international forums. #Greece #Aegean #History