Ankara: While parting gifts after summits and conferences are common, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan certainly stood apart with his choice for one for leaders who attended the NATO Summit in Ankara on Wednesday.
Belgium’s prime minister Bart De Wever was certainly surprised on landing back home to find that he had a handgun and ammunition in his luggage.
In his effort to showcase Turkey’s defence industry, which has become a key export and foreign policy tool, Erdogan decided to gift NATO leaders a vintage revolver, along with live ammunition indicating it was not just for show, as reported by Reuters.
The office of Lithuanian president Gitanas Nauseda shared images of what appeared to be the Gumusay .357 Magnum, a rare six-shooter produced by Turkish arms maker MKE in the 1990s.
The revolver was set in a wooden display box featuring Turkey’s flag and the NATO logo as well as a placard inscribed “Gumusay, the first revolver-type handgun produced in our country” in Turkish and English.
All the leaders had been given the same model, engraved with their own names, a spokesperson for Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez said.
While Wever handed his “gift” to Brussels’ airport police to be secured in a safe, an aide to Polish president Karol Nawrocki told Radio RMF FM that his revolver was awaiting customs clearance at Warsaw Airport and would be kept in an appropriate place “so that it is firstly safe and secondly respected as a gift”.
“Certainly no one will be shooting it,” he added.
The Dutch and Swedish prime ministers’ offices said their revolvers had been take to their respective embassies in Ankara. The Dutch one was due to be disabled while the Swedish one was awaiting import paperwork.
According to a Downing Street source, Britain’s Keir Starmer’s gun came with a cleaning kit and 500 bullets.
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s revolver was already stored at the seat of government, the Palazzo Chigi, along with other state gifts, while EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen was intending to donate hers to a military museum. The leader of Greece planned to give his to the War Museum in Athens.
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, joked that “it struck me that my gift of maple syrup kind of undermatched” the Turkish present. He said that he had not actually seen the weapon.
“I would like to reassure Canadians – they keep guns away from me,” he told a press conference, saying the revolver had been deactivated and might end up in the national war museum.
Small arms manufacturers in Turkey now focus on semi-automatics, making the Gumusay something of a collector’s curiosity.
Experts point to how Turkish gunmakers have muscled into Europe’s civilian firearms market with inexpensive pistols and shotguns, challenging older Italian and Belgian names long associated with higher-priced sporting and service weapons.
The Geneva-based Small Arms Survey says that Turkey was the world’s third-largest exporter of small arms between 2019 and 2024, with exports totalling about $3 billion over the period, behind the United States and Italy.
