Türkiye seeks to boost economic and diplomatic ties with the Balkans as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visits Albania and Serbia this week.
Erdoğan landed in Albania on Thursday to inaugurate the Great Mosque of Tirana, the largest mosque in the Balkans whose construction was financed by Türkiye.
He was welcomed by Albania's President Bajram Begaj with an official ceremony at the presidential palace in Tirana. The pair held a bilateral meeting and chaired an inter-committee meeting.
Regional and global developments, including the latest developments in the Balkans, as well as Israel’s attacks on Gaza and occupied Palestinian territories and Lebanon, will also be on the president’s agenda.
When he hosted Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in February, Erdoğan pointed out that Türkiye was among the five largest foreign investors in Albania with $3.5 billion (3.2 billion euros) committed there.
More than 600 Turkish companies employ more than 15,000 Albanian workers, he added.
The two NATO member countries also cooperate in the military field. Tirana's military arsenal includes Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones, the first of which arrived this year.
On Friday, Erdoğan will head to Serbia, where Türkiye made a major political comeback in 2017 with his landmark visit to Belgrade.
At the time, Erdoğan and his Serbian counterpart Aleksandar Vucic mended ties between their countries.
Five centuries of the Ottoman presence in Serbia have weighed heavily on relations between Belgrade and Ankara.
Another source of tension has been the cultural and historical ties between Türkiye and Serbia's former breakaway province of Kosovo. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, a move Belgrade still refuses to recognize.
The 2017 visit nevertheless repaired Türkiye's relationship with Serbia, Belgrade-based analyst Vuk Vuksanovic told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Since then, "the Balkans is quite a success story for Türkiye."
Military cooperation
Occasionally, the ties between Türkiye and Serbia were frosty, including when Ankara last year sold drones to Kosovo, sparking anger in Belgrade that deemed the move "unacceptable."
But the row could be resolved with a new cooperation agreement, estimated Vuksanovic.
"I would not be surprised if we see a military deal at the end of this visit," Vuksanovic said.
He expected the talks in Belgrade to focus on "military cooperation, the position of Turkish business companies, and attempts by Belgrade to persuade Ankara to tone down support for Kosovo."
Erdoğan is expected to address the efforts to de-escalate the tensions between Kosovo and Serbia, which have prevailed despite efforts for normalization by actors in their wider region to turn down the heat.
The two Western Balkan countries have always been at odds as Belgrade refused to recognize Pristina’s independence from it in 2008 and continues to claim it as its own territory. But more recently, a series of actions by the Kosovo government, such as making the euro the sole legal currency and outlawing the Serbian dinar in predominantly Serb-populated areas, have sparked unrest.
Even though the rapprochement between Ankara and Belgrade is relatively recent, the economic ties between the two countries are already significant.
Turkish investments in Serbia have increased from one million to $400 million in the past decade, according to the Türkiye-Serbia Business Council, quoted in June by Türkiye's Anadolu Agency (AA).
Turkish exports to Serbia reached $2.13 billion in 2022, up from $1.14 billion in 2020, according to Serbian official figures.
Serbia is also an important tourist destination for Turkish nationals, second only to Bosnia-Herzegovina.