An abrupt "about face" occurred in Athens on Monday after the state-run news agency pulled its earlier dispatch from Turkey, which claimed that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had called for a "referendum" on the status of western Thrace, a Greek province, and even referred to Cyprus, Thessaloniki and various Aegean islands in an irredentist manner.
The news agency, AMNA, said the statements were erroneously conveyed, with the references attributed to the Turkish mass daily "Sabah" rather than to the Turkish president. The agency issued a correction in the late afternoon.
The dispatch, now discredited, was widely disseminated in the Greek press and even generated a stern rebuke by the Greek foreign ministry.
A corrected version of the story had Erdogan stating that "It is the duty and right of Turkey to care about Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Crimea, Karabahk, Bosnia and other brotherly areas. Turkey is not just Turkey," he said in an address in the Black Sea city of Rize, his ancestral home. He added that "the moment we resign from this, will be the moment when we lose our independence and our future."
