Terms of good neighbourliness do not currently exist in relations with Turkey, National Defence Minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos told public broadcaster ERT on Friday.

The Greek Foreign ministry, in a statement on Wednesday, accused Turkey of making “an ill-advised attempt to falsify history,” in response to an announcement issued by the Turkish foreign ministry the previous day. At the same time, it called on the neighbouring country to come to terms with its history, so that events like the genocide of the Greeks of Pontus will never be repeated.

In 2013, historian Vlassis Agtzidis uncovered three newspaper reports from 1924 which describe how the administration of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk sent 400 tonnes of human remains (approximately 50,000 human bodies) to the port of Marseilles, France aboard a British flagged ship. The reports appeared in The New York Times, the French newspaper Midi and the Greek newspaper Macedonia.