Ninety years ago today, on July 20, 1936, nine nations signed the Montreux Convention in Switzerland, handing Turkey ful...

Ninety years ago today, on July 20, 1936, nine nations signed the Montreux Convention in Switzerland, handing Turkey full military control over the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, a grip it has never relinquished. The agreement replaced the demilitarization regime imposed by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which had stripped Turkey of the right to fortify or garrison the Straits after World War I. With Montreux, those restrictions were lifted entirely, and Istanbul celebrated through the night. Ships sounded their horns in the Bosphorus, crowds flooded the streets, and Ataturk personally praised the deal to the Turkish press. Turkey's newspapers ran front pages with portraits of Kemal Ataturk and framed the convention as the restoration of Turkish sovereignty, which is effectively what it was. The old Bosphorus forts had been destroyed during the Allied occupation of Constantinople, and Turks had watched their most strategic waterway sit unguarded for over a decade. Montreux ended that. Greece watched closely, and not from the sidelines. Greek diplomats at Montreux actively supported Turkey's push to reclaim control of the Straits, a stance rooted in the Greek-Turkish rapprochement that had followed the 1930 Ankara Agreement. The Greek representative at the conference reportedly told Turkish delegates that working for Turkey felt like working for his own country. The more pressing concern in Athens was what the deal meant for Lemnos and Samothrace, two Greek islands inside the demilitarized zone. If Turkey was now free to rearm around the Straits, Greece wanted the same right for its islands. Greek officials and press at the time argued the convention implicitly lifted all prior restrictions on the zone equally, covering both the Turkish and Greek sides. That question never fully went away. Turkey's use of Montreux remains a live geopolitical issue, most recently debated during the Russia-Ukraine war when Kyiv pushed Ankara to block Russian warships. Ninety years on, the convention still shapes who moves through one of the world's most contested waterways. #MontreuxConvention #Greece #Turkey