The Street Dogs of Istanbul
Canines in the city's culture and history and Turkey's controversial new animal law
Despite vocal opposition and ongoing protests, Turkey’s Parliament approved a law last week to remove stray dogs from the country’s streets. Critics say the lack of adequate shelter facilities and veterinary services means many animals will end up neglected or euthanized, decrying what they call a politically motivated move to target the opposition and distract voters from rapid inflation and the cost of living crisis.
A large population of street dogs is nothing new in Istanbul, where one French traveller in 1806 referred to “the multitude of dogs without masters” as one of the “distinguishing characteristics that first struck me in the interior of this extraordinary city.” Neither, though, are efforts to eradicate them, most infamously in 1910 when Ottoman authorities rounded up at least 30,000 dogs and left them to die on the remote island Sivriada (also known as Hayırsızada) in the Marmara Sea.
The French-Armenian director Serge Avedikian won a Palme D’Or at Cannes in 2010 for his beautiful but wrenching animated short film Barking Island (Chienne d'histoire), which depicts the events around the Sivriada massacre. (Watch it here.)
"A century later, dogs are again being used as scapegoats," Avedikian told AFP in 2022 when the current political fight was beginning to brew.
Part of the reason the topic has aroused such passions is that dogs are seen as symbols of broader issues. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has added dog ownership to “drinking whisky by the Bosphorus” as a signifier of the opponents he likes to paint as elite and out of touch with the “real Turkey.” Meanwhile for many dog lovers, the animals are a symbol of the vulnerable in society, whether women and children subject to violence, or minority groups “cleansed” from the land in previous generations. Avedikian has said the subject of his film was not just the dog massacre in 1910 but also the Armenian genocide that occurred five years later. (Tellingly, a trio of pashas orders the deportation and death of the dogs in Barking Island.)
Writing in the journal Middle Eastern Studies in 2018, academic Cihangir Gündoğdu drew a parallel between the systemic efforts to annihilate stray dogs in the late Ottoman era and the methods of “forced labor, reformatories or deportation” used in the same period to get “beggars, orphans and the unemployed” off the street. What they had in common, he writes, were being “actors irreconcilable with the modern image that the reforming bureaucracy and modernizing elites sought to project.”
As anthropologist Kimberly Hart explained to me when I wrote about Istanbul’s dogs a few years ago for The Washington Post, in older times street dogs played important roles in the community: they “served as guards for neighborhoods, ate the garbage, and would bark to alert people when there were fires.” And just as earlier waves of urban change lessened the need for those “services,” today’s rapacious development practices are having their own deleterious effects.
In affluent central Istanbul neighborhoods like Cihangir or Moda, lucky street dogs lounge at cafes where they’re named, fed, and beloved by the locals. But as any runner, hiker, or cyclist in Turkey knows, human-animal relationships aren’t always so idyllic. Dogs taken off the streets by local municipalities in (previously) illegal sweeps or abandoned by fickle pet owners are often dumped in forests and other areas on the urban fringes, where they can form aggressive and frightening packs. And as cities like Istanbul sprawl ever-outward, the poorest human residents often end up pushed to those same fringes, where their perceptions of, and interactions with, street dogs can be very different from those living in richer areas.
“People in poor neighborhoods experience [dogs] as a security issue – these are women working as cleaners, children traveling long distances to school who have to walk to the bus and wait in the dark, and are afraid of dogs on the street,” Mehmet Ali Çalışkan, director of the Istanbul-based think tank the Reform Institute, said on a panel I attended last month, pointing out that there is a class-based divide on the issue in addition to the more discussed cultural one. “In wealthier areas, people see the dogs as a charitable/humanitarian issue, a subject of neighborhood community and activism.”
Now, as in the past, the situation of street dogs is Istanbul is not only a reflection on how people treat animals, but on how hospitable a place the city itself is, and for whom.
“A city without nature, without trees, without a human-scale life is not inhabitable for animals and not good for people either,” anthropologist Hart told me when I interviewed her in 2021. “Most people I’ve talked to think there’s no way animals will be able to live on the street in the future, even those who advocate for them to have that right. There’s just too many cars, too many buildings.”
Dogs in history and literature:
The Four-Legged Municipality: Street Dogs of Istanbul – The Istanbul Research Institute’s online presentation of its 2016–17 exhibition includes a wonderful collection of historical photographs and excerpts from foreign travelers’ written accounts of the city’s dogs dating back to 1793.
Köpek - The Dog – This short story by the early 20th century Turkish writer Sabahattin Ali has been recently translated into English for the first time by Aysel K. Başçı.
My previous writing about street animals in Istanbul:
‘They see them as fellow citizens’: How Istanbul’s street dogs have found a place in society – A new documentary highlights the long relationship between the Turkish metropolis and its many strays. (The Washington Post, March 2021)
What happens to street animals when tourists suddenly disappear? – As coronavirus forced millions of people around the world into lockdown, another sizeable population had also been hard hit—stray cats and dogs. (National Geographic, April 2021)
The Extraordinary Lives of Istanbul's Street Cats – A new documentary follows some of the city’s famous felines as they navigate the ever-changing urban environment. (CityLab, April 2016)
Some academic articles of interest:
Dogs Feared and Dogs Loved: Human-Dog Relations in the Late Ottoman Empire by Cihangir Gündoğdu for Society & Animals 31 (2023)
A Compassionate Correspondence: On the Humane Killing of Street Dogs in Istanbul by Mine Yıldırım for Yıllık: Annual of Istanbul Studies (2022)
Istanbul's intangible cultural heritage as embodied by street animals by Kimberly Hart for History and Anthropology (2019)
Caring for Istanbul's Street Animals: Empathy, Altruism, and Rage by Kimberly Hart for Dog’s Best Friend? Rethinking Human-Canid Relations (2019)