Imia
pair of unpopulated islets in southeastern Aegean
Imia (Greek: Ίμια) is a pair of small uninhabited islets in the Aegean Sea, situated between the Greek island chain of the Dodecanese and the southwestern mainland coast of Turkey. They are known in Turkey as Kardak.
Imia was the object of a military crisis and subsequent dispute over sovereignty between Greece and Turkey in 1996. The Imia dispute is part of the larger Aegean dispute, which also comprises disputes over the continental shelf, the territorial waters, the air space, the Flight Information Regions (FIR) and the demilitarization of the Aegean islands. In the aftermath of the Imia crisis, the dispute was also widened, as Turkey began to lay parallel claims to a larger number of other islets in the Aegean. These islands, some of them inhabited, are regarded as indisputably Greek by Greece but as grey zones of undetermined sovereignty by Turkey.
Geography
The islets lie 5.5 nautical miles (10.2 km; 6.3 mi) east of the Greek island Kalymnos, 1.9 nmi (3.5 km; 2.2 mi) southeast of the Greek island of Kalolimnos, 3.8 nmi (7.0 km; 4.4 mi) west of the Turkish peninsula of Bodrum, and 2.2 nmi (4.1 km; 2.5 mi) from the Turkish islet of Çavuş Adası. The islets lie some 300 m (1,000 ft) apart from each other, the eastern one being slightly larger than the western one. Their total surface area is 10 acres (4.0 ha).
The islands are also referred to as Limnia (Λίμνια) in Greek, or İkizce in Turkish, or as Heipethes in some early-20th century maps.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Imia” as pair of unpopulated islets in southeastern Aegean. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2119012. VIAF identifies the subject as 240540233. The Library of Congress control number is sh96010484. Authority coordinates are 37.051, 27.151. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Imia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.