evidence: During classical antiquity, the entire Aegean Sea area was incorporated into the Greek and Hellenistic cultural sphere. Great Ionian cities such as Ephesus, Miletus, Smyrna, or Halicarnassus, all of them in Asia Minor, speak of the cultural unity prevailing in antiquity in this wide geographical contour, which was maintained for several centuries thanks to Byzantium. [...] The Treaty of Sèvres never came into force, as a consequence of the Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish war. The Treaty of Lausanne (1923) put an end to that war and led to the international recognition of the new Republic of Turkey as the successor to the Ottoman Empire. The new treaty clearly defined the borders between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. Thus, Turkey formally renounced claims to several territories, including the Dodecanese, Cyprus, Egypt, Sudan, Syria and Iraq. However, it reverted sovereignty over the islands of Imbros and Tenedos to Turkey. Lemnos remained under Greek sovereignty. [...] A particularly sensitive moment occurred in Imia in 1995. Imia-Kardak are two uninhabited islets whose control is disputed by both countries. After a series of secret landings by the armies of both sides, tensions around the two islands came close to triggering an armed conflict, which was averted thanks to NATO's diplomatic intervention. The same decade also saw the infiltration of numerous Turkish secret agents into Greece, who set off a series of large-scale fires. In response to these actions, some Greek citizens set fires in forested areas located in Turkish territory.