This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Early in the morning on August 17, 1999, an earthquake struck northwestern Turkey.
It was the first of two earthquakes that would devastate that nation and parts of Greece.
Whole cities were reduced to rubble.
Thousands of people were killed, and hundreds of thousands were left homeless.
Amid the destruction, however, something extraordinary happened.
Turkish rescue workers saved a greek child from the wreckage of a building.
A greek man offered to donate a kidney to someone in Turkey.
And the greek foreign minister, George Papandreo, called on his fellow Greeks to offer aid.
I heard the news and the media immediately asked me, have you sent a statement?
And I said, you know, I sent a statement, but I want to say something more.
Why don't we help the Turks?
Why don't we give blood?
What made this remarkable is that Greece and Turkey have long had a rocky relationship, marked by periods of open warfare and animosity.
But George Papenreio saw an opportunity for rapprochement between the two nations.
I felt this was a real issue, but it was also a political act.
The idea of blood, of course, has a much deeper symbolism.
The interesting thing, which I hadn't expected was there was an outpour of help.
In the weeks that followed, the blood drive intervention and other aid efforts transformed the way many Greeks and Turks saw each other.