The west-Anatolian-Aegean area underwent a series of multiple continental collisions which started in the Mesozoic (Sengor and Yilmaz, 1981). The collisional zone (e.g., the Vardar-Izmir-Ankara suture zone) migrated southwestward or southward, down to the present position of the Cyprus-Hellenic subduction zone. There are several papers that described the opening of the Aegean Sea and the surrounding extensional areas as a backarc basin (e.g., Horvath and Berckhemer, 1982, Royden, 1993) in the hangingwall of the Hellenic subduction zone (Christova and Nikolova, 1993) superimposing the Mesozoic to present orogens. Since McKenzie (1972), the migration of the Hellenic arc has been related to the northward push of the Arabian plate, and the interpreted consequent westward escape of the Anatolian plate. This idea was and still is so popular that in the literature it became a sort of dogma for the eastern Mediterranean geodynamics (e.g., Yaltõrak et al., 1998; Martinod et al., 2000; Bozkurt, 2001, and references therein). Recently, Seyitoglu and Scott (1996) and Gautier et al. (1999) questioned this point, showing that the Aegean extension pre-dates (Upper Oligocene-Lower Miocene) the Africa-Eurasia and Arabia-Eurasia collisions (Middle-Upper Miocene) and therefore it cannot be a consequence of it. Extension in the “Aegean-Anatolia” realm is probably even older, dating back to the Late Eocene in Eastern Bulgaria as indicated by the early stages of opening of the Burgas Basin (Doglioni et al., 1996). It was then claimed that the gravitational collapse (Seyitoglu and Scott, 1996) allowed by extensional boundary conditions after 30 Ma (slab retreat) could be the primary cause for post-orogenic extension in the Aegean and Western Anatolia (Gautier et al., 1999; Jolivet, 2001). Two main magmatic signatures occur in the study area since Miocene times, i.e., 1) typical subduction-related, southwestward migrating Miocene to Present calk-alcaline volcanism and 2) Upper Miocene-Quaternary alkaline Na-rich magmatism (Benda et al., 1974; Yilmaz et al., 2001).

In this paper we discuss an alternative geodynamic scenario for the eastern Mediterranean. It is based on a multidisciplinary approach of structural field work, new geodetic computations, magmatic constraints and tectonic modeling.