YEREVAN, APRIL 30, ARMENPRESS. Turkey's backlash against European countries that call Ottoman Turks' 1915 massacre of Armenians genocide will complicate Ankara's ambitions to join the European Union, the commissioner in charge of EU enlargement told a newspaper on Thursday.

As reports “Armenpress” citing Reuters, Turkey denies that the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians in what is now Turkey, at the height of World War One, constitutes genocide and relations with Armenia are still blighted by the dispute.

Turkey has also rebuked EU members including Germany and Austria whose parliaments used the word in resolutions marking the 100th anniversary of the event this month.

Commissioner Johannes Hahn told Austrian newspaper Der Standard that Ankara's "very harsh" reaction should be seen in the context of elections coming up in June.

"This may be quite popular in parts of the country and among certain parts of the population. But what worries me are the long-term consequences," he was quoted as saying in an interview.

"The seeds of an anti-European and anti-Western stance are thus sown, which from today's perspective makes a future (EU) entry very difficult."

The European Parliament this month also backed a motion that called the massacre genocide, days after Pope Francis provoked fury in Turkey by using the same term.

Previously it was reported that in his sermon during the Divine Liturgy dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide offered in St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis called the mass killings and massacres of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Turkey in 1915 a Genocide. He said that the slaughter of the Armenians was the first genocide of the 20th century.

Among other things, Pope Francis said the Armenian killings were the first of three "massive and unprecedented" genocides that was followed by the Holocaust and Stalinism. He said others had followed, including in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi and Bosnia.

The Pope welcomed the President of the Republic of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, the Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians His Holiness Karekin II, the Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia Aram I and the Catholicos Patriarch of the House of Cilicia Nerses Petros XIX, who attended the liturgy.

Pope Francis also honored the Armenian community at the start of the Mass by pronouncing a 10th-century Armenian mystic, St. Gregory of Narek, a doctor of the church. Only 35 people have been given the title, which is reserved for those whose writings have greatly served the universal church.