“There’s a mystery, an unpredictability about both cats and Istanbul,” says Ceyda Torun, the Istanbul-born director of a new documentary film “Kedi,” which tells the stories of seven of the city’s many street cats and the people who love them. Named after the Turkish word for “cat,” the movie shows how deeply intertwined Istanbul’s felines are with the lives of the city’s residents — a relationship Torun says her research indicates goes back thousands of years.
A zoologist at Istanbul University showed Torun a 3,500-year-old cat skeleton uncovered during construction of the Marmaray underwater rail system. “It was dug up right on the coast of the Bosphorus Strait and has a healed bone on its leg,” Torun says. “The zoologist’s professional opinion was that the bone could only have healed in the way that it did if it was wrapped up by a human.” [...]
People in Istanbul have long cared for the city’s non-human residents: In the Ottoman era, many houses were constructed with cat doors, and many mosques with built-in birdhouses, says Torun. “Many people told me, if you’re a true Muslim, you’re a lover of all animals,” she adds, explaining that the texts of Islam, Turkey’s majority faith, include stories about the Prophet Muhammad’s particular love for cats. But as Istanbul has grown from village to town to crowded megalopolis, that duty has come to seem more and more imperative.
No comments:
Post a Comment