Costas Karamanlis and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime ministers of Greece and Turkey, are due to meet next month on the frontier in Thrace to celebrate progress on a pioneering cross-border project – a €300m pipeline to carry natural gas from Turkey to Greece and eventually Italy.

The 285km line from Karacabey in western Anatolia to Komotini in Greece, under construction by the Turkish and Greek state controlled gas utilities, is due to be completed in 2007.