The Cats of Istanbul: How a City of 16 Million Built Itself Around Its Strays

Walk off the Kadıköy ferry and you will step around a cat before you reach the main road. Sit down at a café in Beyoğlu and one will take the chair opposite you with the confidence of someone who paid for the table. The cats of Istanbul are not a tourist-quarter novelty. They are closer to municipal infrastructure with fur, backed by six centuries of religious law, charitable endowments, butcher contracts, city budgets and, more recently, a documentary that made $5 million out of watching them nap.

This is the part visitors usually miss. The cats are not tolerated. They are provisioned.

Table of Contents

• A City That Counts Its Cats in Six Figures
• How They Got Here: Ships, Rats and Wooden Houses
• The Ottoman Paperwork That Fed the Cats of Istanbul
• Ritually Pure: Why Cats Walk Into Mosques
• 1910: The Year the City Exiled Its Dogs
• Gli, Tombili and the Cats of Istanbul Who Became Monuments
• Kedi: How a Documentary Made the Habit Famous
• The Law, the Food Vans and the Part the Postcards Skip
• FAQ

A City That Counts Its Cats in Six Figures

Nobody knows exactly how many street cats live in Istanbul, and the honest answer is that the estimates disagree by an order of magnitude. The figure quoted most often in international press is around 125,000. Some counts push past a million once every alley, garage and construction site is included. The city government uses a working number of its own: the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality has stated it aims to vaccinate, sterilise and care for roughly 165,000 street cats alongside about 130,000 street dogs.

Whatever the real total, it is large enough that cat lovers online gave the place a nickname it did not ask for: Catstanbul. In a metro area of roughly 16 million people, the cats are not a rounding error. They ride the ferries, sleep in university lecture halls, and sit in mosque courtyards during prayer while nobody moves them.

How They Got Here: Ships, Rats and Wooden Houses

The origin story is commercial, not romantic. Fatih Dağlı, co-founder of the Cat Museum Istanbul, traces the first arrivals to trading ships going back to Phoenician times, when cats were carried aboard to keep rodents out of the cargo. A port city on two continents received a lot of ships. Cats came off them and stayed.

Then the city gave them a job. Ottoman Istanbul was built largely in wood, and wooden housing is excellent habitat for rats and mice. A dense timber capital with a rodent problem had an obvious use for a small, self-directed predator that required no salary. The cats were not pets in the modern sense. They were pest control that happened to be charming, which is a much stronger negotiating position than being merely charming. Our piece on the history of black cat superstitions covers the European end of the same story, where things went considerably worse for them.

The Ottoman Paperwork That Fed the Cats of Istanbul

Here is the fact that reframes everything. The cats of Istanbul were not fed by sentiment. They were fed by paperwork.

Ottoman society ran much of its public welfare through the vakıf, the Turkish form of the Islamic waqf: a charitable endowment created by a founder, locked into a legal deed, with a defined income stream and a defined purpose. Vakıfs funded soup kitchens, fountains, libraries, hospitals and mosque complexes. Ottoman administrative records show that some of them were written to cover street animals too, setting aside income to provide food and shelter for the cats, dogs and birds of a given neighbourhood. Women were notably active among the founders of endowments that looked after the animals of the city as well as its people.

Butchers were brought into the system, contracted and compensated to hand out offcuts and offal to street animals. Feeding the strays was not a private kindness performed when someone felt like it. It was a line item with a budget, an administrator and a legal instrument behind it, which is why it survived individual moods and individual centuries.

The Mancacı Was an Actual Job

The system even produced an occupation. The mancacı walked the streets selling liver and offal so that passers-by could buy a portion and feed the animals themselves, or simply hand over coins and have the mancacı do the feeding on their behalf, in God’s name. It is a small detail with a large implication: there was enough steady demand for street-animal feeding to support people who did it for a living.

Ritually Pure: Why Cats Walk Into Mosques

The legal and religious status of the animal explains a difference you can see on any street in the city. In Islamic jurisprudence cats are ritually pure. A cat does not invalidate your state of purity for prayer, and its fur or its wandering through a room does not require you to repeat your ablutions. That is why cats enter homes freely and why nobody chases one out of a mosque. Dogs are handled far more restrictively in most schools of law, particularly regarding saliva.

The tradition has a founding cat person, too. Abu Hurayra, the companion of Muhammad who narrated more hadith than anyone else, carried a nickname that means “father of the kitten.” The account is that he kept a stray kitten in his sleeve, and the name stuck to him more firmly than his own.

The Muezza Story Comes With an Asterisk

You will hear this one constantly in Istanbul, usually from someone very confident. Muhammad had a cat named Muezza, the cat fell asleep on his sleeve, the call to prayer came, and rather than wake it he cut the sleeve off and went to pray one-sleeved. Lovely story. It is also not in the Quran and does not appear in the canonical hadith collections. It is later tradition, worth knowing before you repeat it as scripture. The habit is real and old. That anecdote is folklore, which has its own value as long as you label it correctly.

1910: The Year the City Exiled Its Dogs

If you want proof that the city’s arrangement with its animals was never guaranteed, look at what happened to the dogs.

In 1910, during a modernising push in which street dogs had come to be associated with backwardness and poverty, the municipality under mayor Suphi Bey rounded up an estimated 80,000 of them and shipped them to Sivriada, a barren rock in the Sea of Marmara. A plan to sell the animals to France had collapsed when the French side withdrew. The dogs were left on the island with no food and no water. Most died of hunger and thirst. Some drowned trying to swim back toward the city that had removed them.

An earthquake struck soon afterwards, and a widespread reading at the time was that the city was being punished. The island has been called Hayırsızada ever since, “the inauspicious island.” No comparable operation was ever carried out against the cats. The cats had the better legal and religious standing, and they kept it.

Gli, Tombili and the Cats of Istanbul Who Became Monuments

Two street cats made the jump from local fixture to civic symbol, and both stories say something about how the city files its animals.

Gli was born in 2004 and grew up inside Hagia Sophia. She became internationally recognisable in 2009, when photographs circulated of Barack Obama and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stopping to pet her during a visit. She spent sixteen years in one of the most photographed buildings on earth, fell ill in September 2020, and died on 7 November 2020 at a veterinary clinic in Levent. Her death was reported by news outlets from London to Delhi, which is not a normal send-off for a stray.

Tombili worked a different beat. He lived in Ziverbey, in the Kadıköy district on the Asian side, and became famous through a single photograph: a heavy-set cat reclining on a step, propped on one elbow, watching the street with the posture of a man who has finished his shift. He died on 1 August 2016. Locals started a petition to have him commemorated, gathered around 17,000 signatures, and Kadıköy approved it. A bronze sculpture by local artist Seval Şahin, showing him in exactly that pose, was unveiled on 4 October 2016.

The Statue Was Stolen, Then Returned

About a month after the unveiling, the statue disappeared. The municipality announced the theft on 8 November 2016, and the reaction was loud enough that on 10 November the sculpture was back in place. Two days. Istanbul has an unresolved civic to-do list as long as the Bosphorus, and it recovered a stolen cat statue over a weekend.

Kedi: How a Documentary Made the Habit Famous

For most people outside Turkey, the entry point is a film. Kedi, directed by Ceyda Torun, premiered at the Istanbul Independent Film Festival on 21 February 2016 and reached North American cinemas on 10 February 2017 through Oscilloscope Laboratories.

The production numbers show how much material the city offers. The team scouted about 35 cats, filmed 19, and cut the final film down to seven: Sarı, Duman, Bengü, Aslan Parçası, Gamsız, Psikopat and Deniz. Custom rigs were built to shoot at cat height, which is why the film looks like it was made by an unusually competent cat rather than about one.

Festivals and sales agents initially had no idea how to market 80 minutes of Turkish street cats. It went on to hold a 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes across 128 reviews, take about $2.8 million in North America and over $5 million worldwide, and become one of the biggest documentary earners of its year. At the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards, Torun won Best First Documentary and the cats collectively won Most Compelling Living Subject, which remains one of the funniest sentences in awards history. The film works because it refuses to behave like a nature documentary and acts instead like a portrait of a neighbourhood, closer in spirit to slow living than to wildlife television.

The Law, the Food Vans and the Part the Postcards Skip

Turkey passed its Animal Protection Law, number 5199, in 2004. For years it had a structural weakness: animals sat legally closer to property, so harming one tended to be assessed as damage to goods. That changed in 2021, when Law 7332 amended the framework to treat animals as living beings, moved cruelty out of the property category, and set penalties up to four years in prison. Municipalities also carry sterilisation duties for street animals.

In 2024 a new and far more contested law on street dogs went through, requiring municipalities to collect them into shelters, with euthanasia permitted for animals that are terminally ill, in pain or judged dangerous. Protests were large. One detail matters here: the initial draft covered cats, and that article was removed after public outcry. Cats were left out. The dogs were not, again.

Day to day, the machinery is visible. The Istanbul municipality distributes roughly a ton of food a day through vans, runs six animal health centres plus a mobile clinic known as the VetBus, and employs around 100 vets and veterinary technicians. In 2018 it reported caring for 73,608 animals, against 2,470 in 2004. It has stated there has not been a rabies case in Istanbul since 2016. Small wooden cat houses appear on pavements, and the city has installed vending machines that dispense pet food when you feed them a coin.

Now the part that gets edited out of the travel content. Free-roaming cats carry a real disease burden. A 2000 study found feline immunodeficiency virus and feline leukaemia virus common among outdoor cats in the area. A 2015 survey of 316 stray cats found 3.4% positive for hepatozoon, 1.8% for anaplasma, Ehrlichia or Bartonella, and 0.3% for Toxoplasma gondii. Communal feeding points, the backbone of the whole arrangement, also concentrate animals around shared bowls, which is exactly how infections move. Walk through a poorer district instead of Cihangir and the average cat looks different: thinner, scarred, worse off. Trap, neuter, return is the mainstream veterinary answer, and it only works if it runs at a scale that matches the population.

None of that cancels what Istanbul does. It means the honest version of the story includes vet bills. A city that treats animals as residents rather than as property is attempting something most cities never have, and the messy execution is still the most advanced version of the idea running anywhere at this size. If you like the broader argument about arranging daily life around presence rather than efficiency, our guides to hygge and niksen sit in the same territory, and wabi-sabi makes the case for the imperfect version over the polished one.

FAQ

Why are there so many cats in Istanbul?

Three reasons stacked together. Cats arrived on trading ships and found steady work controlling rodents in a wooden-built port city. Islamic law treats cats as ritually pure, so they entered homes and mosques rather than being driven out. And Ottoman charitable endowments, the vakıfs, funded the feeding of street animals as a formal obligation. The habit outlived the empire that created it.

How many street cats live in Istanbul?

There is no reliable census. Commonly cited estimates start around 125,000 and run past a million depending on method. The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality works with a figure of roughly 165,000 street cats for its vaccination and sterilisation programmes, which is the closest thing to an official number.

Did Turkey’s 2024 stray animal law apply to cats?

No. Cats appeared in the initial draft and were removed after public backlash before the law passed. The final legislation targets street dogs, requiring municipalities to collect and shelter them, with euthanasia allowed in specific cases. Street cats stayed outside its scope.

Who were Gli and Tombili?

Gli lived in Hagia Sophia from her birth in 2004 until her death on 7 November 2020, and became internationally known after being photographed with Barack Obama and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2009. Tombili was a Kadıköy street cat famous for a photo of him reclining on a step. He died on 1 August 2016 and got a bronze statue in Ziverbey, unveiled that October after a petition gathered around 17,000 signatures.

Is Kedi worth watching?

If you want the texture of the city rather than a list of facts, yes. Ceyda Torun’s 2016 documentary follows seven street cats and the people who look after them, holds 98% on Rotten Tomatoes from 128 reviews, and made over $5 million worldwide. It is deliberately unhurried, and the camera stays at cat height for most of it.

The Takeaway

Istanbul did not decide one morning to love cats. It inherited a legal category that made them clean, an endowment system that made feeding them somebody’s formal job, and a rodent problem that made them useful. The affection came later and sits on top of infrastructure. That is the interesting part. Kindness that depends on mood is fragile, and the dogs of 1910 found that out. Kindness written into deeds, budgets and municipal vans lasts six centuries and survives the collapse of the empire that wrote it. The cats are still there. So is the paperwork. Curious about the smaller daily behaviours? Start with why cats knock things off tables.

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