Guessing from your username, you must be coming from a close neighbour of Turkey.
Consider Turkey's politics:
It's 2003 and RTG comes to power on a gazillion of promises with a historic election victory of a party which wasn't part of Turkish L'Ancien Régime for the first time ever.
The party is nominally Islamist, but of a garden variety. Essentially they are a party of rural Turkey, and they try hard to put something on the table in urban areas. What they put on the table was EU accession.
For a first time, everything goes almost too good to be true. Economy is booming, population is euphoric. The EU accession protocol was initiated, Turkey does a lot of reforms, and concessions to EU. Even the impasse with Greece gets seemingly close to resolution.
And then... as if somebody slams the lid on the piano. Sarkozy pops up like a genie out of a bottle, and a tectonic shift starts in Europe. Then 2008. Then troubles on the Southern border. And then the Lira flies.
RTG now has to choose way for survival for his himself, and his party. He considers what he can still sell to the electorate.
To keep banging his head at EU's door, knowing that the this door will be closed for the foreseeable future, and that pro-EU electorate will leave him, that it's an increasingly unpopular with his core electorate, and that this is a near certain losing move, or do a 180°, and turn towards increasingly more loud whispers in his core electorate of turning towards "proper Islamisms," and overall more hardcore right politics — something which sustained previous regimes in Turkey without fail (or at least did until the next military coup.)
This is how I see it.
Greece really had no better option than to bury the past conflict with Turkey back then.
