Turkey's President Abdullah Gul goes to Armenia Saturday to watch a football match and start to tackle nearly 100 years of animosity over Ottoman Empire massacres that has left the two neighbours barely able to talk to each other.

But Gul has come under attack at home for the major policy change that will see him become the first Turkish head of state to visit Armenia. He will join his counterpart Serge Sarkissian in Yerevan to watch a qualifying match between the two countries for the 2010 World Cup finals.

Ties between the two have been poisoned by Armenia's campaign to have the World War I killings of Armenians in Ottoman Empire Turkey recognised as genocide.

The trip will only last a few hours, but Gul and Sarkissian are expected to hold talks ahead of the match on regional issues such as Ankara's proposal for a Caucasus regional security forum, trying to avoid contentious bilateral problems, according to diplomatic sources.

The last time leaders from the two countries met was in 1998 on the sidelines of an international gathering. That ended when Turkey's Suleyman Demirel left the room after Robert Kocharian of Armenia insisted that Ankara acknowledge the killings as genocide.

Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their people were killed in orchestrated massacres during World War I as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart.

Turkey rejects the genocide label and argues that 300,000-500,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with invading Russian troops.

The painful episode sends nationalists into a frenzy in both countries nearly a century after it happened.

Gul's visit has sharply divided public opinion.

Opposition parties and some private groups have condemned the trip, others see it as a rare opportunity to seek a new era in troubled bilateral ties.

"What has Armenia done to change its policy of hostility towards Turkey over the issue of Armenian lies, what has it done to withdraw from Azerbaijani territory? Nothing," Deniz Baykal, leader of the Republican People's Party (CHP) told Turkish news channel NTV.

Any change between the two neighbours will take time.

Armenian and Turkish diplomats have met four times since 2005 in neutral countries in a bid to find common ground. The last time was in July in Switzerland. No progress has been announced publicly.

Experts in both countries have stressed that this is just a cautious first step.

"The Turkish president's visit to Armenia is of huge importance," said Yerevan-based political analyst Sergei Shakariants.

"But it is impossible to expect that a first meeting will be enough to resolve problems that have endured for centuries. This meeting is a simple first contact," he said.

"Gul's visit is a bold move, but one should not expect much from it," said Cengiz Aktar, an international affairs expert at Istanbul's Bahcesehir University.

"First of all, there is no a real desire in Turkey to make peace with Armenia and the atmosphere is not suitable for ground-breaking moves."

The Turkish government has adopted a cautious tone.

"The facts that we have do not support the theory that the visit will resolve all the problems, but it is not right to assume that nothing will come of it either," State Minister Mehmet Aydin was quoted by the Anatolia news agency as saying.

Turkey has refused to establish diplomatic ties with Armenia since the former Soviet republic gained independence in 1991.

The two states have found no way to discuss the past.

In 2005, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan proposed a joint commission of historians to investigate the World war I events, saying Turkey should not be ashamed of its history. Armenia rejected the idea as a political maneouvre.

In 1993 Turkey shut its border with Armenia in a show of solidarity with its close ally Azerbaijan, then at war with Armenia over Nagorny Karabakh, an Armenian-majority region in Azerbaijan which declared independence.

The move dealt a heavy blow to Armenia, an impoverished nation sandwiched between Turkey and Azerbaijan in the strategic Caucasus.