Opinion: Our Non-Human Neighbours: Feral Animals of Istanbul, The Agents of Our Past Futures and Future Pasts - Urban Anthropology

Gelibolu: A Cat Rewilding Herself

“She is the most beautiful cat I have ever seen. I hope she is well taken care of,” said my mom as she entered our apartment in İstanbul a couple of years ago. She was talking about the white-grey fluffy cat with the greenest eyes who lived around our building. “Maybe we should take her in then,” I said, not expecting anything. I still do not know what got my mom to accept my request, maybe the fact that my sister has recently moved out, but in a matter of hours, we found ourselves in the veterinarian getting the cat checked out for any diseases and taking her back home. We had to keep her quarantined for around a week to make sure she did not carry parasites or viruses that she may transmit to our house cat, Ginny. During this time, the newest addition to our house tried to get used to being inside my room and using a litter box. She was much feistier than my already highly active cat and gave me a few scars when I tried to show her affection. She peed on my bed and tried to attack Ginny even when she saw her from a distance.

Figure 1: Gelibolu  - Photos from our failed trial to keep her at our house (my own images) 

After her quarantine time ended, she became the queen of the house, both terrorising and capturing the hearts of everyone. She would spend quite a lot of time in front of the house door and even managed to escape once when my mom was receiving a delivery. We found her in the car parking lot and lured her back with food. It took hours. We started worrying that she may be missing being outside, but we thought she needed time to get used to us and her new settlement conditions, and my mom did not know how to give up now that we had adopted her. Just as we started thinking she was getting used to us,  our house cat Ginny got sick. We thought it was a virus spread from our new cat (she still had no name because me and my mom had completely different ideas, but I called her Gelibolu), but it turned out it was just the stress due to Gelibolu’s active presence. Right around the same time, Gelibolu ran away again. My mom and I spent hours looking for her: in the parking lot, the construction area next to our house, the street, everywhere. She was nowhere to be seen, hiding very well from us. Without any luck finding her, we went back home. I cried for hours. A couple of days later, returning from her grocery shopping, my mom came up to me excitedly, “I found her! Should we get her?” I said no, having contemplated for days, I knew a house was not where she wanted to be. She was a feral cat, wild at heart. That is how we let her go. However, it was not the end of our story. She might have left our house and lost her collar immediately, but we kept our friendship, visiting her in the street, feeding and talking to her, until I moved to Belgium and my mom moved to another neighbourhood. She stayed in the streets, living her life, probably having forgotten us already. 

Introduction

In her article, Istanbul’s Intangible Cultural Heritage as embodied by Street Animals, Kimberly Hart shares an ethnographic instance where a woman suggests, “If everyone were to take one cat, they would be able to live in a warm place.” Indeed, “Adopt, do not shop” is a well-known slogan by Turkish people, one of the proposed ways to mitigate the street animal “problem,” especially in cities characterised by speedy urbanisation. İstanbul is an example: housing more than 15 million inhabitants, the city’s efforts for urbanisation are marked by rant-based (government’s unearned income through the appropriation of private property) renewal projects with poor planning and no priority for green spaces, which in turn leaves increasingly limited space for stray animals to thrive (Hart 2019, 157). However, the case of Gelibolu, represented above, showcases that offering a warm house would not be a solution as straightforward as it is considered to be, and reminds us that house animals and stray animals cannot be shown the same treatment as for the latter a home means somewhere else than what humans perceive it to be. Gelibolu proved this: through the agency she has expressed, she decided where to live and how she would interact with me and my mom. And it is because of her agency our entanglement became much more complex than an owner-pet relationship. Gelibolu was neither our cat nor just another cat. She was with us as long as she needed us, but at the same time, she could live by herself, feeding from the trash if she had to. This ambiguity is not an exceptional one as it would resonate with many Istanbulites’ experiences with feral animals, leaving an unlimited sphere of arguments about how to define and treat them within the cityscape: Are they welcome members we cohabit with or intruders that threaten public health and modernization process? Fortuny explains this inability to define these animals’ presence through Paul Shepard’s concept of an animal on the edge: The categories created by human observers would always have non-human elements that would resist them by falling onto the edges, simply because it does not reflect their gaze, with feral animals being exemplars of this. This cognitive fallacy to define the feral would reflect on the attitude towards them, as well as transformation and ambiguity in a larger sense (Fortuny 2014, 272). As a city in a constant state of transformation, İstanbul becomes an intriguing field to analyse the interactive network of its feral ecology and human inhabitants to gain a deeper understanding by utilising a framework that looks beyond the reflections on modernization and anthropocentric analysis of urban development.

In the face of this problematization, the current paper will primarily act as a humble attempt to situate the feral animals’ spaces, (in)visibility and membership in İstanbul, more specifically the stray cats and dogs in the scope of this paper, through an exploration of their biopolitical identities and agencies. In order to do so, the first section will offer an informative account of the human-non-human relationships in İstanbul city, human rights movements, and the legal rights of stray animals. Furthermore, this base would then allow for a discussion on the role of feral animals in İstanbulites’ embodiment of historical, cultural, and political memories. Overall, the article aims to offer a non-human perspective into the study of urban theory through a street-level exploration through the gaze of the four-legged residents of İstanbul as they construct an unthinkable part of our present.

Theoretical Framework

One might argue that feral cats and dogs cannot be considered among the urban characteristics of İstanbul, based on the claim that they have been habiting here for centuries. However, such a critique would be to reduce the study of the urban to only what is new that comes along with it, disregarding the analytical value of identifying how the past is interwoven with the present. In her article, The Urban Now: Theorising Cities Beyond the New, Robinson discusses how the association of cities with modernity generates a teleological understanding of urban development, which undermines the specificity of each urban modern in relation to their complex histories (Robinson, 2013). She calls for alternative approaches and conversations to understand the urban condition through the lens of urban now: by interpolating diverse temporalities and geographies to the shaping of urban outcomes, “more globally relevant understandings of the urban” can be discovered. (Robinson 2013, 15). This paper takes on the invitation Robinson extends to other researchers; by taking feral animals as a unit of analysis, it presents a picture of multi-temporal realities of the urban, which would not only provide more than human insights about  İstanbul and its residents’ embodied experience of cultural memory but also exemplify a perspective which could be utilised as a conceptual tool in more expansive geographies and histories. Similar to Robinson’s article, this paper also gets its inspiration from the theories of Walter Benjamin. However, while she develops the concept of the “urban now” from Benjamin’s analysis of modernity and analysis of 19th-century Paris (Robinson, 1), this paper would try to adopt a perspective influenced by Walter Benjamin’s critique of historicism, described in his Theses on the Philosophy of History.

Before beginning an attempt to explain Benjamin’s concept of history, it is crucial to start by claiming that the Theses on the Philosophy of History is an incredibly dense piece of writing that can yield a multiplicity of interpretations. In this text, Benjamin describes the image of a real historian as “he who grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one” instead of contending himself by establishing history as a sequence of untangling events with a cause and effect relationship. (Benjamin 1968, 263) In other words, the historian is the one who does not conform to view the past as simply a succession of rulers and victors but constructs the past by recognizing the present and the horrors that have had an impact on its shaping. (Benjamin, 1968) He criticises conformism to the cruel conditions people endure in the present by framing them as historical norms. Instead, he calls for a reconstruction of history informed by the elements of the present, or following his conceptualization, the stars in the constellation, to investigate the events that have contributed to the creation of the so-called norms. He continues his critique of historical progress by stating that the concept assumes a “progression through homogenous, empty time.” (Benjamin 1968, 262) For him, history is not a manifestation of the “infinite perfectibility of humankind,” (Benjamin 1968, 262) but rather a depository of historical knowledge accumulated through the struggle of the oppressed itself. (Benjamin 1968, 260) He visualises this idea of a cache of historical knowledge through a Klee painting named “Angelus Novus.” He draws a parallel between the angel in the painting, the main subject, and the mess in front of it, with a historian, “angel of history,” “and the history as a “one single catastrophe keeps piling wreckage.” (Benjamin 1968, 257) It is the angel of history who can see through the “storm what we call progress” (Benjamin 1968,258), adopts a constructive perspective of the past by being aware that what is excluded from historicism is precisely what shapes it: Understanding the past through the lens of the present era. Walton explains this idea of dialectical thinking as a historical method by stating, “For Benjamin, each present moment and contemporary era must be comprehended dialectically as a past future.” (Walton 2019, 356) This idea of the past future will be a relevant conceptual tool in the remainder of this paper as it will try to improve the understanding of the current urban present of İstanbul by analysing how the ambiguous position of the stray animals, simply through their ubiquitous existence in the cityscape, challenges the idea of conceptualization of the urban that is based on progress and the new and showcases how the remnants of the past still linger around us, becoming the building blocks of alternative modernities. In the specific case of Turkey, stray animals also provide a contradictory account of the idea of a rupture of the country from its Ottoman past, which was prominent, especially in the early days of the republic, enforced by the reform process led by President Atatürk. How adopting this framework, namely, acknowledging the relevance of those perceived as non-modern and non-human in the present can provide insights on current political polarisation in the geographies they inhabit will be discovered more in detail in the following sections. 

Figure 2: Angelus Novus by Paul Klee, 1920, Monoprint.

Situating the Feral in İstanbul

The image of a bridge is probably one of the most cliche metaphors to describe İstanbul, especially when considered in its material sense, the bridge between Asia and Europe. The debates on the current balance between the European and Middle Eastern characteristics of this city with a growth pattern incomparable to any other European city have been the focus of much research and discussions about İstanbul in contemporary academic literature. (Eckardt 2008, 15) However, for Erckardt, bridges are also spaces that offer perspectives on different people, between strangers and natives. (Eckardt, 14) Such an approach to the bridge as a conceptual tool can also work when navigating the relationship between the past and the present, animals and humans and public and private. In line with this perspective, the stray animals of İstanbul expand our point of view beyond the limits of binary thinking: Firstly, they disturb the relationship between the urban and nature. As a process that solely prioritises the needs of humans, urbanisation is often synonymous with denaturalization, where non-human beings are deemed as trespassers. (Narayanan 2016, 480). However, this view often disregards the intimate, and sometimes even vital, interdependent relationships between the human street poor and the street animals. Narayanan exemplifies this by explaining the role of street canines in India as efficient burglar alarm systems for the people living in poor informal settlements, and a source of security and companionship, especially for women. (Narayanan 2016, 487) Similarly, street dogs in İstanbul act as the watchdogs of their neighbourhoods and survive by consuming refuse, protecting the residents from both human and non-human threats. (Hart 2019, 455) This mutually beneficial relationship between two invisible members of modern society also provides an insight into the exclusionary mechanics of the colonial city and its biopolitics: neither the poor population nor the feral animals are seen as full humans, therefore not belonging to the ideals of a sterile and healthy city. In Foucaldian terms, biopower refers to ways in which power can be instrumentalized to choose who to “make live and let die.” Its political component concerns the control over populations through the management of resources with an impact on their survival conditions. (Ward and Prior 2020, 104) In this case, both the poor and feral animals remain outside the sphere of protection. It can be deduced that their urban presence is let to die, the latter through relocating them to the forests, neutering or directly by culling, and the prior through gentrification and urban renewal projects focused mainly on informal settlements. However, in reality, the others of the urban, whether non-human beings or humans, are not opportunistic occupants who simply take advantage of their surroundings, but they act as agents, or actants, who shape the city in multiple ways. (Ruddick et al. 2023, 2069-2070) 

Concerning this particular linkage between feral animals and urban residents with limited resources, one may argue that an infrastructure shaped through the collaboration and interaction between the two parties emerges. In his article titled; People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg, AbdouMaliq Simone explained how urban residents orient themselves and find profitable opportunities through collaborating with multiple actors and identities. (Simone 2004, 419) While Simone envisions an infrastructure consisting of humans with different backgrounds becoming interdependent as a way to utilise and expand their scarce resources efficiently, and even exploitatively, the above-mentioned examples of collaborations between the feral and humans suggest that there is a need to expand this framework to more than human. As he welcomes the new forms of solidarity that transpire from makeshift formations that lead residents to engage with a larger world and deal with one another in ways that would have been non-existent otherwise (Simone 2004, 426-427), including feral ecologies in this perspective of analysing complex urban relationships only takes his approach further and more comprehensive, understanding the makings of the city beyond anthropocentric frames of reference.

Having said all, this companionship based on the shared experience of exclusion from formal spaces and mutual benefit is not the only way in which the human and non-human residents of İstanbul interact with each other. Hart shares how surprised she was by her interlocutors’ devotion to caring for street animals and their shared concern over animals’ well-being despite their diverse socio-economic backgrounds during her ethnographic research in İstanbul. (Hart 2019,449) Indeed, in İstanbul, many people do not only keep domestic pets in their house but take care of several more in the streets, not necessarily in the way my mom and I tried to take care of Gelibolu in our failed attempt, but through sharing their food with them in the street, constructing small hubs for cats to sleep in, and even undertaking the expenses of the veterinarian if they see an animal in urgent need given they have the means to cover it. However, it would be deceptive to suggest that there is a pet-owner relationship formed between the street animals and human residents in such cases, as there is a certain authority the street animals exert over their conditions of living, both in terms of space and the type of relationships that they choose to form with humans, exemplified by our experience with Gelibolu. This specific type of entanglement of human and animal worlds makes the concept of ferality useful in referring to street animals. Having said this, however,  like the ambiguity surrounding the street animals' presence in an urban environment, feral is also a complicated term. In ecology, feral refers to the “creatures that have escaped captivity and are free-ranging,” who have become subjected to the processes of natural selection once more rather than the artificial selection imposed by humans. (Barua 2021, 897) Barua further argues that beyond its ecological sense, ferality also refers to those who are “neither domestic nor wild, threatening to disrupt social order.” (Barua 2021, 898) Here, the political possibility of the feral shines through, challenging the perception of endless progress, colonial legacies and a concept of urbanity based on anthropocentric ideals. By challenging the binary of the domestic and wild, the feral disrupts the human claim on the cityscape, their agency, sociability and ability to survive in geographies specifically designed for humans undermine the biopolitical power of those who are in leadership positions.

Despite the discourse of empowering and resisting elements discussed in the previous section regarding the presence of street animals, it is critical to emphasise that the situation is not exclusively characterised by affirmative perceptions and relationships. The narrative surrounding Istanbulite street animals extends beyond instances of wholesome cohabitation, as hostile perceptions have fueled efforts to assert control over their populations. With these negative perceptions which are usually fueled by raising concerns over the public health threats these animals may expose to the human residents, such as rabies, parasites, and dog bites or concerns regarding the sterility of the streets, the presence of the street animals, especially street dogs, has been perceived as a testament to the underdeveloped character of the city, at least according to the standards of western ideologies and conceptions of civic space, Fortuny suggests. (Fortuny 2014, 286) Additionally, the specific case of the street dogs is further complicated by the ambivalent views towards dogs in Islam, the majority religion in Turkey: While some forms of Islam, including Shiite Orthodoxy, forbid touching a dog due to its uncleanliness, thereby deeming the act Haram, there are also a significant number of Muslims that defend the street animals’ rights with regards to their status as the creatures of God, claiming that it is only at God’s capacity to give and take life. (Fortuny 2014, 275-276) This perspective, which regards street animals as living souls, is not shared only by religiously devoted. “They are also living beings.” is a commonly used phrase by many animal lover residents when discussing street animals’ belongingness to the urban public spaces, embracing an understanding of mutual existence beyond faith-based concerns. However, this affectionate view is not shared by many, and animal abuse remains a serious element of urban street life (Fortuny 2014, 276). At one side of the spectrum, there are animal rights activists who consider animals not as living beings that need to be taken care of by their human stewards, but rather as agential members of society who can take care of themselves and have autonomy in how and where to live. Even though both animal rights activist and those who see animals as living beings needs to be taken care of defend the right of urban animals to co-exist with humans, the ideological differences between animal lovers and animal rights activists and the way that situate the feral within the ecology of the urban often lead to disagreements on how to draw a strategic roadmap to ensure peaceful and respectful co-living conditions. This tension between the diverse opinions reflects on the extent of animal rights in the country. According to the Animal Welfare Law No.5199 Protection of Animals, animals are recognised as sentient beings in themselves and not the property of humans, yet at the same time, they are also split into categories based on whether they are kept or unkept. The term, “Sahipsiz Hayvan,” utilised in the law to refer to free-roaming animals, in Turkish translates directly into “Unowned Animal.” (Animal Welfare Act, 2021) Regardless, after its enforcement in 2004, it was protested widely in 2008 Istanbul street marches, demanding stricter rules and calling for the efficient enforcement of the law to fight against the torture, mistreatment and abuse imposed on dogs. In 2012, several protests took place against the plans to send stray dogs to forest sanctuaries, which lacked public trust regarding its welfare conditions. (Fortuny 2014, 281) The ambiguous position of stray animals in law, reflecting the ideological anxieties between a more left-leaning ecosocial and more conservative stewardship perspectives, as well as the protests that illustrate the lack of trust in the executive, legislature and judicial powers of the government construct an example of the political possibility of the feral and how their entanglement with the human yields to considerations beyond the ecological concerns. Through their socially, politically and ecologically ambiguous status, feral animals break the limits of the urban-rural, human-animal dichotomies and disrupt modernist ways of thinking. Their existence is intertwined with their presence in the urban milieu, their relationship with humans, and their capacity to exert their autonomy.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are people completely against the presence of stray animals in the cityscape, seeking elimination measures that include culling, and moving animals either to shelters or to the peripheries of the city, such as forests or Prince’s Islands of Istanbul. As mentioned earlier in the paper, most people belonging to this part of the spectrum validate their request and dislike the presence of stray animals based on concerns over public health, especially highlighting the news about dog aggression against humans. At the same time, however, many cite the example of European and North American metropolitans, discussing how these modern cities do not have stray animals wandering around. Most of the efforts to address the stray animal presence in İstanbul, including the Catch, Neuter, Return plan have been Western solutions to urban problems, which is not necessarily surprising given the impact of westernisation in the history of Turkey. (Fortuny 2014, 282) Accordingly, the upcoming discussion section of this paper will delve into how the study of stray animals can be an analytical tool to understand the westernisation process the country has been going through since the 19th century, and how the top-down approach of implementing modernisation projects have reflected in unintended ways to the general populace. By examining the historical attempts to eliminate the feral, the paper will showcase how yet another dichotomy has been disrupted, namely, the rupture between modernity and the past. In Benjaminian terms, we have started our journey by looking at the present to understand the precarious situation of urban animals, and now we are turning our faces to the recent past to reconceptualize one of the most crucial tensions that Turkish society endures.

Unleashing Modernity: Stray Animals and Societal Shifts in Istanbul's Historical Landscape

Offering a historiography of urban animals in İstanbul is beyond the scope of this paper. In Islam, Westernization, and Posthumanist Place, Fortuny provides the reader with a historical account of Istanbul street dogs and their complicated relationship to Islam, to a more comprehensive extent, going back to the Neolithic ages. (Fortuny, 2014) However, a particular turning point in the history of the Ottoman Empire coincides with the change of perspective about stray animals in İstanbul, especially dogs, and it relates closely to the subject of this section. The Tanzimat era, late 19th century, was a period characterised by the Ottoman Empire’s attempts to reform and modernise, as a means to reclaim its power that has been challenged by the scientific and technological change in Europe of the 18th century. These attempts had a humanist and anthropocentric ideology, inspired by the Enlightenment. (Fortuny 2014, 279-280) Transformations that the Tanzimat era sought ranged from juridical to political, administrative to social spaces, upending hundreds of years old practices and institutions that survive in the Empire’s lengthy political history. (Topal 2021, 155) The state has guaranteed the right of protection of the non-Muslim population as well as equal treatment before the law (Topal 2021, 157) in its attempts to secularise. These reforms, with a Western influence also encompassed urban transformations, which also had an impact on stray animals, especially dogs. As an example of one of the efforts to “normalise” the civic space to render it similar to Western cities, the Ottoman authorities undertook an attempt to exile the dog population to the Prince’s Islands. It had failed as the dogs returned to the city and kept multiplying. It also influenced the formation of a society for the protection of animals in İstanbul (İstanbul Himaye-i Hayvanat Cemiyeti) in 1912. The society addressed the attempt to send the dogs to Sivriada, another island in the peripheries of the city, and lobbied for new legislation and provided the foundation for the upcoming decades of the animal welfare code. (Fortuny 2014, 281-282) There are a few variables that come into play in the public reaction and the failure to get rid of the stray animals in İstanbul. As mentioned before, although some sects of Islam have deemed touching a dog as Haram, there is still an affectionate relationship that comes from the respect that is required to give to the creations of God. At the same time, the non-commodified structure of the human-animal relationship in Istanbul (Fortuny 2014, 278) and the mutually beneficial outcomes from the collaborations beyond a solely human infrastructure challenge the idea of associating modernisation with progress. It asks the question of “progress for whom?” While the animals themselves showcase their agency and resistance by finding ways to constantly return to the city they are being expelled from, humans also see them as an unthinkable part of their urban lives. While it is true that the control over stray animals has increased and the mistreatments that challenge the lawful practice have persisted until contemporary times, the mere presence of an abundance of stray animals stands as proof of how modernisation cannot be thought of as a one-fits-all process. 

The process of Westernisation and secularisation sped up significantly in the early days of the Turkish Republic. As a newly established country that saved itself from the colonial plans of Entente Power over the Ottoman territories during World War I, the republic needed to break away from its Ottoman past, which was characterised by its suffering from political and military conflicts merged with a dismal economic crisis in throughout its last decades. However, in a similar fashion to what it was trying to escape from, Turkey saw Westernisation as a solution. Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, the state launched a series of modernisation reforms which included the republican definition of citizenship that expanded the idea of Turkishness beyond ethnic roots, following an ideology based on secularism and nationalism, the two prominent pillars of Kemalism. These definitions, however, based on a mono-cultural understanding of the society in a country consisting of multiple ethnicities, traditions and histories, became interpreted as authoritarian secularism and assimilative nationalism in practice. (Göle 2015, 213) The reforms were implemented under a single-party authoritarian rule, and Kemalism aimed to re-construct Turkish society based on secular laws and principles, confining Islam as a cultural practice. (Göle 2015, 4) In addition to those already mentioned, one of the main flaws of this process was that its bureaucracy relied upon clientelist relations with the elite mainly located within the peripheries of the cities or lands owned by the local elite, leaving the concerns of the rural population in the shadows. (Kaya, 584) But as İstanbul, known as the city where the earth is made of gold, or İstanbul’un taşı toprağı altın in Turkish, has became the main emigration destination from rural to urban for those who sought higher education and upward social mobility, it has become more and more a space where multiple identities and publics came into close contact and interaction, often accompanied with intense conflict, especially after the 1960s. (Göle 2015, 215) What this mobility resulted in was the demise of the strict rupture between those known as White Turks, signifying the secularist upper-middle class, and the Black Turks, referring to the faith-driven lower-middle class from Anatolian towns, and the creation of many ambiguous grey areas. The rise of AKP (Justice and Development Party) and its anti-secular discourse has also been successful in addressing these grey areas and the underrepresented population that was once far from the peripheries of the economic and cultural centres of the country but becoming more and more visible in the urban scape. 

The polarised society of Turkey is not a new phenomenon. It has been always there since its foundation. However, it became more and more visible once the urban areas started to be settled also by those excluded from the elite, and as the city became a zone of interaction, conversation and conflict. The spaces that were once reserved for the elite are now occupied by people from different classes, ethnicities and cultures. This is what the reform process has failed to consider: How can the modern and sterile spaces that the republic sought to produce welcome those with a different vision for the future and modernity? Stray animals too, represent these grey areas in the intersection zone of multiple modernisms, between the past and the present. For some, they have no place in the urban and modernised western city; for others, they are living beings either as autonomous members of society with righteousness to live where they please or as animals that humans need to take care of, not in violent but affectionate ways. The amount of arguments, resistance and more than human entanglements the stray animals create for the residents of İstanbul and the government is a reflection of the present of İstanbul, a city that is heavily polarised and stuck in between the Western ideals and the weight of its long history with multiple main actors. This ambivalence of visions is what remains at the core of the city; in its buildings, populace, and politics. It is how animal residents manage to navigate themselves in an unwelcoming topology. However, their significance is not limited by what their physical presence reflects; it is also related to the social, historical and even political meanings they convey to the people who cohabit with them, as the case discussed in the conclusion section will showcase. 

Conclusion: The Case of Gli

In her article, Kim Hart suggests that the multiple “viewpoints on the survival of stray animals are conceptualised through cultural lenses, which people employ to understand modernity, tradition, cultural heritage, rights, and the ideal city.” (Hart 2019,456) Building upon Hart’s argument, this paper also tried to show that stray animals of İstanbul also carry a historical and political memory, represented by the agency they exert and their ambiguous position of between wild and domestic, and how it resonated in public through the theoretical framework it adopted. The aim was to show how an element of the urban often left unnoticed, or not considered a part of, can become an analytical tool to understand the present through reconceptualising it with a different lens of history focused on an unexpected subject: the feral. Differing from most literature referred to in this paper, I tried to combine the historical account with a posthuman vernacular, with an attempt to include the agency of the animals rather than solely focusing on the symbolic meanings that have been prescribed to them. Having said this, it would be suitable to conclude the paper with the story of how the concern over a cat’s wellbeing amounted to intense political arguments in the public sphere. This is the story of Gli, the cat of Ayasofya. 

Gli, a name which is said to mean the union of love, (Hagia Sophia Turkey, 2017) is a cross-eyed cat that has lived in Hagia Sophia throughout her sixteen-year-long life. She became famous when her video with US President Obama and Turkey’s then-prime minister Erdogan went viral, where they stroked her during their visit to Hagia Sophia. Since the video went viral, Gli has welcomed almost as many visitors as Hagia Sophia, becoming one of the symbols of the place. She has a Wikipedia page, an Instagram page with more than 100k followers and many news pieces dedicated to her. She died at the age of sixteen in 2020, just a few months after the monument was reverted to its status as a mosque, as it was during the Ottoman era, from a museum. (Middle East Eye, 2020) 

Figure 3: An illustration of Gli holding Hagia Sophia by ooometebeyler to commemorate her

Figure 4: An illustration of Gli in the fashion of the mosaics used in churches by Necdet Yılmaz

Figure 5: A photo of Gli in Hagia Sophia, from her Instagram page, @hagiasophiacat

The decision to change the UNESCO World Heritage Site’s status was inherently political with the message of reconquest, gathering mixed reactions, bringing the polarised character of the society forth once more. While the decision was a welcomed one in the eyes of the religious population and has been celebrated as a victory for Muslims in social media, it has also faced a lot of domestic and international criticism stating that the World Heritage Site belongs to humanity and saw it as an anti-secular act taken by the government. (Al Jazeera,2020) The status of a mosque also meant free entry, increasing the number of visitors to the monument, both for religious and touristic reasons. Gli was also a concern of many people during this transition period, especially considering her old age, to the extent that the İstanbul governor had to make a public disclaimer stating Gli was doing very well. (Cumhuriyet, 2020) Unfortunately, not long after, Gli got sick, and it was announced that it was due to her old age. She was relocated to a veterinarian, where she gave her last breath. Her death became breaking news, provoking a great wave of condolences and love for the cat. Thousands of people shared their grievances online, some including political figureheads such as the Istanbul governor and presidential spokesperson. (Middle East Eye, 2020) However, similar to the mixed reactions that the status change faced, the death of Gli has also evoked mixed emotions. 

With sorrow, anger also followed many people, who argued that Gli’s death was due to the stress that the monument’s changing status caused (Middle East Eye, 2020). In a way, this reflected the government’s inability to ensure the welfare of anyone but their followers. Even the death of a cat resulted in political tension, but it did not change Gli’s beloved status and her deep bond with the city’s heritage. She stayed as a symbol of Hagia Sophia from a different period, nostalgic for some, not so much for others, but nonetheless very influential. Unlike her name, ironically,  Gli introduced more diversity than unity, very much in fashion with the city’s diverse modernisms. Yet, she had a lasting impact on Istanbulites’ shared memory beyond what it may seem on a surface level, reminding me of the bittersweet times with Gelibolu, my mom and I had.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ayasofya Kedisi Gli (@hagiasophiacat).2020. “Dünya’nın Kalbi Ayasofya ‘da dünyaya geldim.” Instagram, November 7, 2020. https://www.instagram.com/p/CHTEBOogGJV/

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Cumhuriyet. “Ayasofya’nın Kedisi Gli’yle Ilgili Vali Yerlikaya’dan Açıklama.” 2020. Cumhuriyet. July 18, 2020. https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/ayasofyanin-kedisi-gliyle-ilgili-vali-yerlikayadan-aciklama-1752319.

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