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October 10, 2008
If you ever owned one or, like me at one point, three, you can always tell by the smell. Pungent, stinging and sour, it seems to haunt nearly every staircase and courtyard in Istanbul, leaving many apartments – try finding something in Beyoglu for less than €500 per month to see one yourself – reeking like neglected litter boxes.
It is the smell of cat piss. And it is everywhere.
Because they are everywhere. The drifter cats – the forlorn, scavenging types, prone to hunger and violence, doomed to a short life of misery, ostracism and injury, bawling by the side of a garbage container, wolfing down scraps in alleyways or licking their wounds in basements. The sybarite cats – sleeping between books in an antique shop, cuddling up in storefront windows or, better yet, sprawled out on the still-warm hood of a freshly parked car. And, finally, the goon cats – huddled together, anywhere from ten to fifteen deep, lining the stretch of pavement between the furniture store at Turnacibasi and the police station by Anadolu Sokak, extorting dinner leftovers from the neighborhood housewives and keeping tabs on anyone that might happen to pass. Of these, my favorite, the undisputed leader of the pack is a brownish-black monster with shredded ears, a missing left eye, a scarred nose and – shrouded as it may be in numerous layers of blubber – a visibly warped and mutilated frame, probably made so by either the fangs of a dog or the wheels of a speeding car. After I took a picture of him this morning, the fat bastard looked up, managed a wink out of his one seeing eye, and let me pass. It made me think that I may have already won his – and the gang’s – acceptance as a neighborhood fixture. A hat-wearing, camera-toting oddity, but a neighborhood fixture nonetheless.
With the single exception of the drifter cats, around one day and gone the next, Istanbul cats all seem to be the collective responsibility of the local community. The art dealer down the street will leave a paper plate full of cat food outside her shop. The butcher’s assistant, having fed the local pack of dogs (the city’s canine and feline communities, incidentally, live in perfect communion), will always treat the cats to a few shreds of meat. The waiters at my favorite lokanta, meanwhile, will make sure that the family of six cats who live beneath the restaurant’s outdoor patio – a mother and five kittens – never go hungry, slipping them dishful of leftovers whenever the manager isn’t looking.
As for the city’s dogs, theirs is a pretty sad tale, told best by Time, back in 1937.
May. 03, 1937
From Turkey last week, via the Frankfurter Zeitung, came news that 20,000 stray dogs had last year been cleared off the streets of Istanbul and killed. Travelers lately returned from Istanbul were amazed at the number, having thought that Istanbul's teeming population of pariah dogs was part of its dead past.
Thirty years ago, when Istanbul was Constantinople, visitors to the city found it as overrun with dogs as Hamelin was with rats. Every small section had its band of ten to 25 mongrels—all sizes, shapes and colors—which woke to fighting fury when a dog from another section tried to trespass on its territory. They littered the narrow streets with their droppings, were eternally underfoot, made the night loud with their yapping. But it was part of the Turks' religion to be kind to animals, and the dogs had been there since Constantinople was Byzantium.
Besides, they fulfilled an important civic function. They were the city's Department of Sanitation, wolfing the garbage which householders deposited in the streets.
After the revolution of 1908, one of the early sanitary problems which modernizing Young Turks took up was disposal of the Constantinople dogs. No Turk could be found with the heart to kill the creatures. In 1910, about 40,000 of them were herded onto boats, ferried out to the rocky, uninhabited Island of Oxia in the Sea of Marmora, there left to starve (see cut). For months their piteous barkings echoed across Marmora to the Anatolian shore. A few kindly citizens rowed out with food, but the task was hopeless.
As the dogs became frantic with hunger, boatmen grew fearful that the pack would swim out and capsize them, steered clear of the island. Soon the last lean dog gave up gnawing his dead fellows' bones.
For years after this great purge, Istanbul baited its remaining strays with poisoned meat, killing thousands annually. In recent times the city has erected modern pounds where unlicensed dogs are humanely chloroformed or poisoned, with a thoroughgoing round-up every spring. Returning to the Istanbul of Kamâl Atatürk in 1935 after an absence of 36 years. Sir Evelyn Wrench was impressed not by dogs but by cats. In London's Spectator he wrote:
"The Turk is not unkind according to his lights. He thinks it cruel to drown litters of kittens, he therefore puts them on the dustheap! In every side street you meet the cats, old and emaciated cats, cats with one eye blind, kittens toddling with unsteady step, cats with skin diseases, cats eternally scratching themselves, dying cats run over by cars on the roadside. When I asked residents in Istanbul what could be done about the cats, they shrugged their shoulders. 'Istanbul was menaced in its old wooden houses by a plague of rats; cats were necessary.' "
If you ever owned one or, like me at one point, three, you can always tell by the smell. Pungent, stinging and sour, it seems to haunt nearly every staircase and courtyard in Istanbul, leaving many apartments – try finding something in Beyoglu for less than €500 per month to see one yourself – reeking like neglected litter boxes.
It is the smell of cat piss. And it is everywhere.
Because they are everywhere. The drifter cats – the forlorn, scavenging types, prone to hunger and violence, doomed to a short life of misery, ostracism and injury, bawling by the side of a garbage container, wolfing down scraps in alleyways or licking their wounds in basements. The sybarite cats – sleeping between books in an antique shop, cuddling up in storefront windows or, better yet, sprawled out on the still-warm hood of a freshly parked car. And, finally, the goon cats – huddled together, anywhere from ten to fifteen deep, lining the stretch of pavement between the furniture store at Turnacibasi and the police station by Anadolu Sokak, extorting dinner leftovers from the neighborhood housewives and keeping tabs on anyone that might happen to pass. Of these, my favorite, the undisputed leader of the pack is a brownish-black monster with shredded ears, a missing left eye, a scarred nose and – shrouded as it may be in numerous layers of blubber – a visibly warped and mutilated frame, probably made so by either the fangs of a dog or the wheels of a speeding car. After I took a picture of him this morning, the fat bastard looked up, managed a wink out of his one seeing eye, and let me pass. It made me think that I may have already won his – and the gang’s – acceptance as a neighborhood fixture. A hat-wearing, camera-toting oddity, but a neighborhood fixture nonetheless.
With the single exception of the drifter cats, around one day and gone the next, Istanbul cats all seem to be the collective responsibility of the local community. The art dealer down the street will leave a paper plate full of cat food outside her shop. The butcher’s assistant, having fed the local pack of dogs (the city’s canine and feline communities, incidentally, live in perfect communion), will always treat the cats to a few shreds of meat. The waiters at my favorite lokanta, meanwhile, will make sure that the family of six cats who live beneath the restaurant’s outdoor patio – a mother and five kittens – never go hungry, slipping them dishful of leftovers whenever the manager isn’t looking.
As for the city’s dogs, theirs is a pretty sad tale, told best by Time, back in 1937.
May. 03, 1937
From Turkey last week, via the Frankfurter Zeitung, came news that 20,000 stray dogs had last year been cleared off the streets of Istanbul and killed. Travelers lately returned from Istanbul were amazed at the number, having thought that Istanbul's teeming population of pariah dogs was part of its dead past.
Thirty years ago, when Istanbul was Constantinople, visitors to the city found it as overrun with dogs as Hamelin was with rats. Every small section had its band of ten to 25 mongrels—all sizes, shapes and colors—which woke to fighting fury when a dog from another section tried to trespass on its territory. They littered the narrow streets with their droppings, were eternally underfoot, made the night loud with their yapping. But it was part of the Turks' religion to be kind to animals, and the dogs had been there since Constantinople was Byzantium.
Besides, they fulfilled an important civic function. They were the city's Department of Sanitation, wolfing the garbage which householders deposited in the streets.
After the revolution of 1908, one of the early sanitary problems which modernizing Young Turks took up was disposal of the Constantinople dogs. No Turk could be found with the heart to kill the creatures. In 1910, about 40,000 of them were herded onto boats, ferried out to the rocky, uninhabited Island of Oxia in the Sea of Marmora, there left to starve (see cut). For months their piteous barkings echoed across Marmora to the Anatolian shore. A few kindly citizens rowed out with food, but the task was hopeless.
As the dogs became frantic with hunger, boatmen grew fearful that the pack would swim out and capsize them, steered clear of the island. Soon the last lean dog gave up gnawing his dead fellows' bones.
For years after this great purge, Istanbul baited its remaining strays with poisoned meat, killing thousands annually. In recent times the city has erected modern pounds where unlicensed dogs are humanely chloroformed or poisoned, with a thoroughgoing round-up every spring. Returning to the Istanbul of Kamâl Atatürk in 1935 after an absence of 36 years. Sir Evelyn Wrench was impressed not by dogs but by cats. In London's Spectator he wrote:
"The Turk is not unkind according to his lights. He thinks it cruel to drown litters of kittens, he therefore puts them on the dustheap! In every side street you meet the cats, old and emaciated cats, cats with one eye blind, kittens toddling with unsteady step, cats with skin diseases, cats eternally scratching themselves, dying cats run over by cars on the roadside. When I asked residents in Istanbul what could be done about the cats, they shrugged their shoulders. 'Istanbul was menaced in its old wooden houses by a plague of rats; cats were necessary.' "
