Neighbourhood Istanbul, T眉rkiye
Cats in Cihangir
Istanbul has roughly 125,000 street cats. This is the neighbourhood that looks after them best, and it is ten minutes downhill from Taksim.
Where to find cats in Cihangir: Cihangir, in Beyo臒lu, on the slope between Taksim and the Bosphorus. When: Early morning for the quiet, late afternoon for the cats. Why here: The cats here are fed, named and looked after by people who have been doing it for decades.
The short version
- Where
- Cihangir, in Beyo臒lu, on the slope between Taksim and the Bosphorus
- When
- Early morning for the quiet, late afternoon for the cats
- How long
- A morning, or an afternoon into the evening
- What it costs
- Nothing, unless you put something in a donation box
- Why here
- The cats here are fed, named and looked after by people who have been doing it for decades
What to bring
- A bag of dry cat foodAny market sells it. Not milk, and not your lunch.
- CoinsThe donation boxes in shop doorways buy the food and pay the vet.
- Shoes for a hillCihangir is all slope, and some of it is cobbled.
- Kedi, downloadedThe 2016 cat documentary. You will recognise half the streets.
Why there are cats everywhere
Istanbul does not really have stray cats. It has communal ones.
A cat on a Cihangir street is fed by everybody and belongs to nobody, and that arrangement is old enough and settled enough that the city has never seriously tried to change it. There are roughly 125,000 of them across Istanbul. Nobody is in charge of any of them.
What makes Cihangir the one worth the walk is that here the arrangement is organised. Look down as you go and you will start seeing the infrastructure: cat houses built against walls, some of them painted, feeding stations improvised out of takeaway containers and cut plastic bottles and wedged where the rain will not reach. Once you have noticed one you will not stop noticing them.
There is a second layer above the bowls. Cihangir鈥ool for Cats, started by a resident called Hilary Sable, is the network that handles what a bowl cannot: fostering, adoption, and treatment at a clinic that gives street animals reduced rates. When a Cihangir cat gets hurt, that is who moves.
It is also the one neighbourhood where the cats have names. Ask in a cafe about the ginger one that sits on the third chair and somebody will know exactly which cat you mean.
The walk
Downhill from Taksim to the water, which is both the easiest direction and the one with the most cats on it. About two hours if you stop, and you will stop.
- From Taksim SquareWalk down S谋raselviler Caddesi10 minTaksim metro is about 300m from the top of it.
- From SultanahmetT1 tram to Tophane, then uphill25 minUphill is much harder work than down. Consider starting at Taksim instead.
- From Karak枚yThe T眉nel funicular up, then walk east15 min
S谋raselviler Caddesi
The road in from Taksim. Pharmacies, bakeries, buses. The cats on this stretch are inside the shops, not on the pavement, so look through the doors as you pass. Savoy Pastanesi is on this road if you want to sit down before the hill starts.
A patisserie on the way down. Nobody has asked her to leave.Jwslubbock, CC BY-SA 4.0 Akarsu Yoku艧u
Turn off the main road and the street drops away under you. Cats on the steps outside the flats, and on the walls. Go early if you want it before the cafe tables come out; Le Oba and Smyrna are both along here and open late morning.
The slope. Your knees will notice.elainne_dickinson, CC BY 2.0 Firuza臒a
A small square with a mosque and a coffeehouse, Firuza臒a Kahvesi, where the neighbourhood sits outside on low stools. Sit down and order a tea. The cats work the tables.
Asleep on a step in the middle of the afternoon. Standard.NagerLB, CC BY-SA 4.0 脟ukurcuma
The antique streets. The shops keep their doors open and the cats sleep inside on the carpets, among the lamps and the broken chairs. The Museum of Innocence is at the bottom.
脟ukurcuma Caddesi. The yogurt tub is the water bowl. You will see a hundred of these.Azerifactory, CC BY-SA 4.0 Cihangir Park
A small park with a view straight over the Bosphorus and benches facing it. Sit on one. This is the easiest place on the whole walk to end up with a cat in your lap.
The view from the top. The benches face this way for a reason.Mireia Saenz, CC BY 2.0
Same numbers as the list. Worth keeping open on your phone.
The cats you will meet
Ordinary domestic cats, which is the point: no breed, no papers, several hundred years of everybody. They are used to people and a lot of them will come to you, which is genuinely unusual and is the reason this hill is worth climbing.
Brown tabbies
Striped, with an M on the forehead. Some are long-haired and enormous.
The default Istanbul cat. You will lose count.
Ginger toms
Orange, broad-faced, usually the biggest thing on the street.
The ones that walk up to you. Almost always male.
Tortoiseshells
Black and orange mottled together, no two the same.
Almost always female. Less likely to let you near.
White and tabby
White with coloured patches on the head and tail, sometimes odd eyes.
The ones people photograph and then get wrong. See below.
Everybody says That white cat with one blue eye and one amber eye is a Van cat.
Actually Almost certainly not. Van cats are a landrace from around Lake Van, about 1,200km east of here, and the look is common in ordinary mixed-breed cats anywhere. What you are meeting is a moggy with odd eyes, which is not less interesting, just less rare.
How not to be the annoying one
- These cats are looked after, not abandoned. Treating them as strays in need of rescue is the one thing that reads badly to people who live here.
- Let a cat come to you. Put a hand out low for it to sniff rather than reaching over its head, and read the tail: a slow blink means it is comfortable, a flicking tail means leave it.
- If you feed one, put a little down in a quiet corner away from doorways and traffic, not in the middle of a pavement. Water matters more than food in summer.
- No milk, no sweets, no spicy leftovers. Cats mostly cannot digest milk and it makes them ill.
- The donation boxes are the highest leverage thing a visitor does here. It takes ten lira and no Turkish.
