Greece was reeling yesterday from the sudden death of Mr Yiannos Kranidiotis, the country's Alternate (Deputy) Foreign Minister and one of the chief architects of rapprochement with Turkey, in a freak mid-air accident over Romania on Tuesday night.
The death of the popular politician, along with five others including his son, came on the eve of a fresh round of bilateral talks in Ankara, negotiations that Mr Kranidiotis (52) had done much to promote. He was seen as one of the principal architects of the new relationship between Greece and Turkey.
As the two neighbours conducted the talks yesterday, stunned Greeks, still recovering from Athens's deadly earthquake last week, paid tribute to the minister who had handled European affairs and Cyprus.
Across Greece's normally decisive political spectrum the tragedy was described as "a national loss".
"We are shaken, the whole government, the whole ministry. I cannot believe it," said the Foreign Minister, Mr George Papandreou, holding back tears. "Peace lost a friend, I lost a friend, the most capable colleague in the ministry. Greece and Cyprus lost a tireless worker for the national interest."
The Turkish Foreign Minister, Mr Ismail Cem, telephoned Mr Papandreou to offer his condolences.
The death of one of Greece's most respected politicians "creates a large and irreplaceable vacuum," said the Greek Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, visibly shocked.
The 13-member diplomatic mission was heading for talks in Bucharest when the aircraft is believed to have hit an air pocket, plummeting 17,000 feet in a matter of minutes. The Minister was briefing reporters at the back of the Falcon executive jet, used exclusively by the Greek Prime Minister and his senior colleagues, when it lost altitude.
One survivor, the political columnist, Mr Alfonso Vitalis, said those who died were not wearing safety belts when the plane went into the extraordinary nose-dive. Other victims included Mr Kranidiotis's personal guard, a flight engineer and two well-known television and radio reporters, Dimitris Pantazopoulos and Nina Assimakopoulou. A Greek diplomat and television cameraman remained in a critical condition last night.
"The plane went into a very abrupt descent, stopped, then descended just as suddenly again in the space of about three minutes," said Mr Vitalis. The journalist was forced to clamber over dead bodies when the plane crash-landed at Bucharest where a six-nation Balkan foreign ministers' meeting was due to take place.
As a Greek who also held Cypriot citizenship, Mr Kranidiotis had played a catalytic role in pushing Cyprus's application to join the EU. He had hoped EU membership would be decisive in bringing peace to the war-divided island, where he retained a home in Nicosia not far from the "green" line that separates the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities.
Mr Kranidiotis did little to douse rumours that he intended to run for the office of President of Cyprus.
President Glafkos Clerides of Cyprus said he now feared Mr Kranidiotis's death at such a critical juncture for Greek-Turkish reconciliation would cast a pall over stalled UN negotiations to reunite the island.