Istanbul has a quarter of a million cats and, unlike most of its human residents, none of them pays rent.
They are everywhere: stretched across market stalls, draped over the warm bonnets of parked cars, perched on benches beside the Bosphorus with the air of someone who arrived first. In Sultanahmet Square, a plump grey-and-white tabby holds court near the newsagent who feeds him, tolerating tourists’ photographs with the patience of a creature long past finding anything surprising.
The city has been doing this for centuries. During the Ottoman era, a professional class known as mancacıs was paid specifically to feed street cats. Before that, seafarers on Phoenician and later Ottoman merchant ships carried cats aboard to control rodents. Many disembarked in Istanbul and, apparently, never left. History has a way of turning coincidence into inevitability.
What exists today is harder to categorise than a municipal programme. Istanbul’s cats are neither pets nor strays. They belong to the city, cared for collectively rather than by any single owner. Municipalities operate veterinary departments that provide free neutering. Private clinics offer discounted treatment for street cats. Residents quietly contribute to veterinary bills without being asked. Bowls of water appear outside shops each morning with the same unremarked regularity as the raising of shutters. At the Şakirin Mosque, feeding stations are built directly into the structure. Nobody declared this a policy. It simply became one.
In Islam, cats are considered ritually clean, and the Prophet Muhammad’s recorded affection for them has not gone unnoticed in a predominantly Muslim city. Yet reducing Istanbul’s relationship with its cats to religious observance misses something more ordinary, and therefore more interesting. The cats are useful. They are companions. They move through the city with the assurance of long-term residents, their place secured not by ownership but by time.
The 2016 documentary Kedi followed several of the city’s street cats and the people whose lives intersect with theirs. It ended on a note of caution: modernisation was pushing both people and cats to the margins as Istanbul expanded and property values climbed. A cat museum opened in the Beşiktaş district in October 2023, the result of fifteen years of collecting. Its arrival felt timely. Preservation often begins when the thing being preserved starts to slip away.
For now, the cats remain. They ride Bosphorus ferries between Europe and Asia, waiting for passengers to share food. They wander through mosques with the serenity of creatures that know nobody will ask them to leave. In some meaningful sense, they have been here longer than the tourists and longer than many of the buildings.
Whether they are evidence of the city’s warmth or simply proof that cats will exploit any favourable arrangement is, perhaps, a question worth considering.
