Diplomatic summits usually end with group photos, hollow communiqués and gifts of courtesy - a vase, a book, a local delicacy. But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan decided to break the protocol of the NATO summit in Ankara his own way: he gave each leader a revolver and a box of ammunition, with each weapon engraved with the recipient's name.

The gesture is pure Erdogan staging - a message wrapped in a gift. Turkey is among the largest arms producers in the alliance and wants to be seen exactly that way: not as a country seeking protection, but as one providing it. Giving pistols to allies at a military summit isn't subtle, but it wasn't meant to be.

The comedy came afterwards, when the gifts collided with the reality of European arms laws. The German revolver, meant for Chancellor Merz, had to be transferred to the German embassy for legal import before it could end up in the official collection of gifts. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer simply left his revolver in Turkey to avoid the problem, since Britain's strict gun laws would be breached just by bringing it in. Erdogan attached export-permit documents too, but several countries still got tangled up in their own regulations.

And there lies the small but sharp lesson. While some leaders have to run to lawyers to fit a single pistol within the law, the gesture showed two opposing cultures in one room - one where a weapon is a symbol of power and is given with pride, the other where even a single revolver demands more permits than it's worth. In the Balkans, where guns often lie around homes with no permit at all, this scene feels almost like a story from another world. And yet they were all sitting at the same table.