The day after Athens was struck by its most serious earthquake in decades, millions of television viewers watched in awe as Turkish rescue workers pulled a Greek child from under a pile of rubble. Announcers struggled to control their emotion.

''It's the Turks!'' one of them shouted as his voice began to crack. ''They've got the little boy. They saved him. And now the Turkish guy is drinking from a bottle of water. It's the same bottle the Greek rescuers just drank from. This is love. It's so beautiful.''

Although Greece and Turkey are both members of NATO, there are perhaps no two allied neighboring nations whose dealings have been marked with so much conflict and mistrust. But in the last four weeks, their relations have improved with a spectacular suddenness that no one had expected.

Greece was under Turkish rule for centuries and fought a bitter conflict for independence against Ottoman rule in the 1820's. A century later, the republic of Turkey was formed after Turkish forces drove Greeks from Anatolia, and relations since then have been plagued by conflict.