Turkey Draws Two Parks Into Disputed Waters

Two presidential decrees published on Saturday designate large stretches of sea near Greek islands as Turkish national parks. A marine park cannot create sovereignty under international law. The real question is whether Ankara uses park rules and permits to build practical control before any maritime boundary is settled.

Two parks, two pressure points

President Erdogan signed decrees creating two marine national parks. The first, the Fethiye-Kaş Marine National Park, sits between Turkey's southwestern coast and the waters near the Greek islands of Kastellorizo and Rhodes. The second, the North Aegean Marine National Park, covers roughly 1,742 km² off the Turkish coast near Lemnos and Samothrace (BloombergHT, Harita Haber).

Both appeared in Turkey's Official Gazette on 16 August with coordinate annexes and boundary maps (Hürriyet). These are formal legal instruments, not press statements. They assign domestic conservation status, define drawn boundaries and open the door to permits, patrols and restrictions. That is routine where a state has jurisdiction. The dispute is about where that jurisdiction ends.

Greece says the parks extend beyond Turkish territorial waters (the strip of sea where a coastal state has sovereignty, normally up to 12 nautical miles) into areas where Greece holds continental-shelf rights over the seabed and its resources. Athens's foreign ministry called the decrees illegal and said they "create no fait accompli" (Kathimerini, ProtoThema).

Turkey's position, carried through semi-official media rather than a verified foreign-ministry statement, frames the parks as safeguarding Turkish maritime rights (Daily Sabah).

The cartographic logic

The parks' geography follows a familiar Turkish argument: that Greek islands close to Turkey's coast should generate little or no maritime zone of their own. In the south, the Fethiye-Kaş corridor reflects the same thinking behind the 2019 Turkey-Libya maritime deal, which drew Turkish and Libyan claims across waters Greece says its islands help generate. Athens has spent three rounds of Greece-Libya talks trying to neutralize that deal (To Brief). In the north, placing a Turkish administrative zone between Lemnos and Samothrace amounts to a claim to manage waters Greece considers its own continental shelf or open sea (Kathimerini).

The exact annexed coordinates have not been independently plotted, so no one can confirm a precise overlap. But the broad geography is clear enough: both parks sit where the two countries' claims collide.

Continental-shelf rights do not depend on who draws the latest map. The International Court of Justice established in its North Sea Continental Shelf ruling that such rights exist automatically by virtue of a state's coastline, not because of later administrative acts (ICJ). Turkey is not a party to UNCLOS (the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea), but many of its core principles are treated as binding customary international law (UNCLOS). A conservation label cannot override that framework. A marine park can regulate fishing and require permits where a state already has jurisdiction. It cannot manufacture jurisdiction where none exists.

Greece alone, Europe quiet

As of publication, no other EU government has publicly responded to the decrees. France offers the closest indirect signal: Le Figaro and Opex360 reported rising Turkish drone and aircraft violations of Greek airspace this month, placing the parks within a broader pattern of Aegean pressure (Le Figaro, Opex360).

That silence matters. The parks touch an EU member state's claimed continental shelf and the bloc's external maritime border. Athens says it will raise the matter at EU and NATO level. But neither forum settles maritime boundaries. The EU can issue political statements and apply diplomatic pressure. NATO can manage tensions between allies. Neither can draw the line on a map.

The jurisdiction test arrives when Turkey acts on the decrees. If Ankara begins issuing permits, running patrols or requiring authorization from vessels in waters that international law places outside Turkish control, the parks stop being a conservation label and become something ships and officials must obey. For now, Greece is treating this as a European border issue. The rest of Europe is letting it remain a Greek-Turkish dispute.