TURKEY:After weeks of tensions in the run-up to Pope Benedict's trip, Turkey's mainstream press seemed near enough of one mind yesterday in making the best of a bad deal.
"Benvenuto", read the headline in popular daily Sabah.
Sabah's decision to use the Italian word for "welcome" is characteristic of a country that feels that its positive attributes all too often get lost in translation in a prejudiced international arena.
But it is also typical of the growing realisation here that Benedict's trip is a golden opportunity for this secular, Muslim country, keen to portray itself as a bridge in a divided world.
"An image of Turkey will be created because of it. Will that image be of a dignified, honourable and civilised people? Of course it will," the influential commentator Taha Akyol wrote in his column in the centrist Milliyet. Ideologically light years away from Akyol's religious-minded liberalism, columnist Ali Sirmen agreed wholeheartedly in Cumhuriyet, a staunchly secular newspaper close to the army.
"Protesting the pope's visit does Turkey no good, and Muslims no good," he wrote, in what looked like a barbed allusion to the 20,000-strong rally held by an Islamist party in Istanbul last Sunday. "We have no doubt he will be greeted as warmly as possible."
Far more typical was the rush to turn the presence of the leader of the world's Catholics into a weapon of domestic politics.
For Vakit, a small circulation Islamist newspaper banned in Germany last year for its anti-Semitism, the trip offered yet another opportunity to bash Turkey's very secular president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer.
"Nobody wants the pope apart from Sezer and the Fener Patriarch," it headlined, referring to the Istanbul-based Greek Orthodox leader whom both religious and nationalist extremists hold in disdain.
In the daily Vatan, meanwhile, the secularist-minded chief editor Gungor Mengi jumped on the opportunity to fire another broadside at Turkey's religious-minded government.
"Thank God our prime minister, who's taken it upon himself to work for civilisational peace, gave up on the comedy of trying to escape through the window when the leader of one of the religions he is trying to make peace with came through the door," he ironised. Turkish premier Tayyip Erdogan's decision to meet the pope came at the last minute, though, after weeks spent insisting he would be in Latvia for a Nato summit.
"Everybody is squeezing their own propaganda out of this trip," joked Abdurrahman Dilipak, a columnist for the radical Islamist Vakit. He might as well have been referring to a Vakit colleague of his who raised laughter at a press conference in Istanbul yesterday when he asked Archbishop Demetrios, head of the Orthodox community in the United States, about plans to set up an Orthodox Vatican in central Istanbul.
But the strangest propaganda of all came from Ertugrul Ozkok, chief editor of Turkey's most influential newspaper, Hurriyet.
No fan of Turkey's religious-minded government, he praised the easygoing tone with which Erdogan had discussed the Pope's visit.
"As I listened, I thought to myself how fortunate we were to have lived through 28th February," Ozkok wrote, referring to the date in 1997 when a more traditional Islamist government was edged from power by the army. Few issues are more divisive than such claims that the army - author of four coups - has improved the quality of Turkish democracy. It is a debate that will go on, in all probability, long after Benedict's trip is forgotten.