Undeterred by the unsettling discovery that Turkey's devastating earthquake has brought it two metres closer to its arch rival, Greece yesterday sent planeloads of aid and rescue workers to the country.
The humanitarian airlift followed the Greek government's pledge to do "whatever possible" to help its historic enemy deal with the disaster.
A second lot of C-130 military aircraft carrying medicines, ambulances, mobile hospital units, blankets and tents took off from an airport outside Athens.
Earlier doctors, sniffer dogs and experts with experience in extracting people from disaster zones - including firemen - also flew into Istanbul.
This scale of Greek support has taken many by surprise.
Yesterday the Turkish Foreign Minister, Mr Ismail Cem, personally telephoned his Greek counterpart to thank him for the "unexpectedly generous help".
Mr George Papandreou, the Greek Foreign Minister, who cut short his holiday to oversee the operation, said traditional Greek-Turkish problems bore no relation to the relief effort.
The new NATO members are divided by an array of territorial and minority disputes that have almost brought them to the brink of war three times in the past 25 years.
"This shows another side in our relations that I hope will go beyond the logic of armament and conflict," the Foreign Minister said.
The Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, the Greek President, Mr Konstantinos Stesanopoulos, and even the hardline Archbishop of Athens, who recently called the Turks "the barbarians to the east", also expressed their support and condolences for the quake victims.
As Turkey's nearest Western neighbour, Mr Papandreou said Greece had set up a special government commission to co-ordinate the aid.
Officials said vital know-how and equipment, used to help Albanian refugees in Kosovo, would be reapplied in the case of Turkey's quake victims.
In an unprecedented display of solidarity for the Turks, the Greek public also began gathering food, clothing and medical supplies in response to an appeal by the mayor of Athens.
The mayor, Mr Dimitris Avramopoulos, said he hoped to send plane loads of aid to Turkey in the course of the week.
In Turkey, members of the ethnic Greek minority similarly helped to co-ordinate the aid effort.
Churches across the country also threw open their doors to the homeless at the request of Patriarch Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch and leader of world Orthodoxy, who is based in Istanbul.