“He said he will respond to your letter soon,” Anatolia quoted Papoulias as telling Erdoğan, in an apparent reference to the letter sent by the Turkish prime minister to his counterpart on Oct. 30, the same month Papandreou’s Socialist Party came to power.
In his letter, Erdoğan had expressed Turkey’s readiness to resolve problems with Greece as part of his government’s policy of “zero problems with neighbors” and outlined a set of proposals for a settlement of Turkish-Greek disputes, including complicated territorial problems in the Aegean and Cyprus.
Erdoğan, meanwhile, told Papoulias that he planned to visit Athens soon, Anatolia said, while Papoulias was quoted as saying in response, “The time has come to host you in Athens.”
Erdoğan cancelled a planned visit to Athens last June after doctors prescribed bed rest due to over-exhaustion. Erdoğan had planned to be among the foreign dignitaries attending the opening of the new Acropolis Museum. A statement from the prime minister’s office said at the time that Erdoğan had called his then-counterpart Costas Karamanlis to let him know he would not be able to attend. Erdoğan also expressed his wish to visit Athens and the museum soon.
