Both capitals reached for instruments that raise the dispute a single rung — Ankara through conservation law rather than delimitation, Athens through non-recognition rather than threat
Turkey has designated two large marine national parks in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean by presidential decree, drawing an immediate rejection from Athens. The exchange moves the Greek-Turkish maritime dispute up one deliberate rung — and, on the evidence of both sides’ conduct, no further.
The restraint is visible in the instrument. Ankara acted through domestic conservation legislation rather than a delimitation act or an exclusive economic zone declaration, the latter of which would have triggered a far graver crisis. A national park generates administrative practice, inspection authority and licensing claims in contested water without asserting sovereignty in terms that demand a sovereign answer. Athens, in turn, reached for its standard non-recognition formula, declaring the act legally void rather than threatening consequences. Neither capital has suspended the normalisation track.
Decisions 11626 and 11627, signed by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on 15 August, appeared in the Official Gazette (No. 33342) on 16 August. The first establishes the Fethiye-Kaş Marine National Park, covering 21,706.03 square kilometres off Muğla and Antalya provinces. The second creates the North Aegean Marine National Park, 1,742.14 square kilometres within the provincial limits of Çanakkale and Tekirdağ. Both rest on Article 3 of Law 2873 on National Parks, with management assigned to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s nature conservation directorates.
The scale of the southern designation is the substance of the dispute. No configuration of Turkey’s six-nautical-mile territorial sea between Fethiye and Kaş produces an area approaching 21,706 square kilometres, which places a substantial share of the park in waters Turkey does not claim as territorial. Greek media reported that the zone encloses the sea area around Kastellorizo, and that the northern park lies between Samothrace and Limnos.
The Greek Foreign Ministry responded within hours. It said the parks extend beyond Turkish territorial waters and are therefore unlawful to the extent they occupy international waters, arguing that no state may unilaterally establish marine protected areas beyond national jurisdiction under the law of the sea. Athens added that the designations are also unlawful where they reach into the Greek continental shelf, and that the act produces no legal effect and cannot create faits accomplis. It contrasted the move with Greece’s own marine parks in the Ionian and the Aegean, declared, it said, exclusively within Greek territorial waters.
The sequence is also reciprocal. Greece announced marine parks in the Ionian and the South Aegean on 21 July 2025, prompting Turkish objections; Ankara had protested an earlier Greek announcement in April 2024, accusing Athens of using environmental policy as political cover and warning third parties, the European Union included, against being drawn in. Each side now deploys conservation as a vehicle for jurisdictional signalling, and each rejects the other’s use of it.
The northern designation carries its own weight. Water between Samothrace and Limnos touches the approaches to the Dardanelles and a separate Greek-Turkish file concerning the status of the northeastern Aegean islands — a dossier historically more volatile than hydrocarbon claims further south.
What would convert paper into incident is enforcement. Should Turkish coast guard or fisheries authorities begin inspections in the outer reaches of the Fethiye-Kaş zone, the designation stops being declaratory and starts producing encounters at sea. Until then the escalation remains legible, contained and reversible in practice if not in text.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry had issued no response to the Greek statement by Sunday evening.