Within hours of the bomb blasts at the Turkish resort of Marmaris, chartered jets heading for the same area left UK airports with almost all their booked seats taken. Likewise, few Britons already in Turkey were looking to curtail their holidays, according to travel operators. Turkey is fortunate that British holidaymakers tend to be phlegmatic. More than 1.5 million Britons take a holiday there every year, adding substantially to the £10 billion Turkish tourist industry. Without their cash, the Turkish economy would be even more vulnerable than it is beginning to look.

Tourists are also getting used to the attacks. Since Kurdish separatists unilaterally ended their five-year-old ceasefire in 2004, terrorist violence has again become an unwelcome feature of Turkish life. Before this week, there had been 13 bomb attacks this year. The Foreign Office did not change its advice to travellers overnight. In other words, holidaymakers must factor the dangers into their plans when choosing their destination.

If, however, the initial blasts, presumed to be the work of of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and which were followed by another in Antalya yesterday, mark a concerted increase in terrorist activity, the calculations may change.

There are two forces at work: the decades-old struggle for Kurdish recognition and Turkey’s prospective membership of the European Union, after official negotiations were launched last October. The two overlap.

Reconciling Ataturk’s vision of a national, secular identity for Turkey with the demands for ethnic recognition by the country’s Kurds, who at 14 million make up 20 per cent of the population, has been fraught for decades. Relations appeared to turn a corner after Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ground-breaking speech in Diyarbakir last year in which the Prime Minister accepted mistakes of the past, admitted there was a Kurdish problem and ushered in a thaw in relations that bore legislative fruit. Limited TV and radio broadcasts in Kurdish were allowed. A ban on the printing of letters in the Kurdish alphabet was lifted. A new law allowed private courses to teach Kurdish. Yet a year later the country is suffering some of the worst violence since the mid 1990s.

Government overtures to the Kurds were driven partly by the demands of Turkey’s prospective EU membership. But the prospect of signing up to the Brussels club has unsettled some. Many Kurds are against joining, because it would effectively end their hopes of securing an independent state. Many in Turkey’s powerful national security establishment, who hate having to make concessions to the Kurds and do not want their power curbed, would also be happy to see the project sabotaged.

Mr Erdogan deserves help from Europe. Yet such are the efforts of France and Austria to block Turkish membership that some in Ankara are in danger of giving up on Brussels. This would be bad for Turkey, for the EU and for British tourists visiting the country.