The declaration was the culmination of seven months of work to renew long-stalled talks that began in October when Ankara offered Ocalan an unexpected olive branch.
The news won a cautious welcome on the streets of Diyarbakir, the main city in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast, where locals have seen repeated efforts to end the violence come to nothing.
"We want this process to move forward and not be left unfinished. They shouldn't deceive the Kurds as they did before. We really want peace," 60-year-old worker Fahri Savas told AFP.
There was a similar sentiment in Iraqi Kurdistan's Erbil, where Khaled Mohammed, 55, warned: "We only support the peace process if it is serious and accompanied by international guarantees."
Remains to be seen how genuine Erdogan is (probably not very much).