Greece made history on Thursday when 72 young women reported for duty at a military camp near Lamia, becoming the first ...

Greece made history on Thursday when 72 young women reported for duty at a military camp near Lamia, becoming the first female volunteers to enlist under a new structured military service program. Women aged 20 to 26 can now serve 12-month voluntary stints under the same conditions as male conscripts, with access to reserve officer selection, military hospitals, and public-sector hiring advantages. The program, initially targeting between 100 and 150 volunteers, had been announced last year as part of a broader modernization drive for the Greek armed forces. Across the Aegean, Turkey's pro-government press read the moment very differently. The Turkish outlet ahaber.com.tr ran the headline "Panic in Greece over the Blue Homeland: Athens turns to female soldiers," framing the enlistment program not as modernization but as evidence of Greek anxiety over Turkey's expanding military power. The Blue Homeland, known in Turkish as Mavi Vatan, is Ankara's revisionist maritime doctrine asserting sweeping sovereign claims over large sections of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, and has long been a flashpoint between the two NATO allies. The Turkish outlet alleged that Greece is trying to build its armed forces to between 180,000 and 200,000 personnel, and claimed female recruits would be deployed near the Greek-Turkish border and on eastern Aegean islands. Some Turkish media also suggested the program was driven partly by domestic political calculations and an effort to address unemployment. The most inflammatory response came from Ibrahim Karagul, former editor-in-chief of the pro-government newspaper Yeni Safak, who posted on social media that Greece and Cyprus had become instruments of Israeli strategy and that Israel was preparing to draw Greece into a war with Turkey. Karagul claimed Israel would ultimately abandon its regional partners once conflict began. The reality of the program is considerably more straightforward. Women have served as professional personnel in the Greek military for decades. This is the first time a structured voluntary pathway has been opened to female conscripts, and it mirrors the terms already applied to men. The timing of Turki...