The Ottoman Empire: A Historical Haven for Street Animals

Early European travelers to Ottoman cities wrote about many things that surprised them: the architecture, the markets, the food. One subject appeared in their accounts with particular consistency. Cats slept undisturbed in mosque courtyards. Dogs stretched out in the sun on major thoroughfares. People stopped to feed them without ceremony, as if this were simply what one did.

In 1591, the Czech nobleman Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw wrote from Istanbul: "Cats generally gather here and wait at certain hours for people to come and give them alms." He found the practice baffling. What he was observing was a culture in which caring for street animals was woven into religious and daily life so thoroughly that it required no explanation from the people doing it.

“The animal on the street is God’s creature”

The belief behind this culture was specific: all living beings belong to God, and feeding or helping an animal is an act of charity that carries spiritual weight. Feeding a hungry dog on the way to the market was the same category of act as giving bread to a poor person. The intention behind it, and the reward it earned, were understood in the same terms.

This did not mean animal welfare was merely transactional piety. The care was also practical, ecological, and deeply embedded in neighborhood life. Dogs guarded districts at night. Cats controlled rats in homes and warehouses. Large birds like kites cleaned the city of waste. The relationship between humans and street animals in Ottoman cities was one of long mutual use, and the culture of feeding reflected that.

People who harmed a street animal faced immediate social consequences. Travelers from several countries recorded that bystanders intervened quickly and publicly when they witnessed cruelty. There was no formal law requiring this. The social expectation was sufficient.

Everyday charity and the culture of feeding

The “manca” tradition and the street vendors who fed animals

Over time, caring for street animals generated its own economy. A specialized profession emerged called mancacılık. The vendors, mancacılar, prepared boiled mixtures of liver, tripe, and meat scraps and carried them through the streets calling out "Kediye et, köpeğe et", meat for the cat, meat for the dog. Residents bought portions and distributed them to the animals in their immediate vicinity. This practice is documented in Ottoman-era sources and represents one of the clearest examples of organized, commercially supported urban animal care anywhere in the premodern world.

Cats waiting on garden walls

Travelers also described scenes at particular hours of the day: cats gathered on garden walls and thresholds, waiting. Elderly women arrived with skewers of meat or small dishes of food prepared at home. The cats ate without coming down. The women left. This happened at predictable times, in predictable places, because the animals had learned the routines and the people had built their days around keeping them.

Charity during Ramadan

During Ramadan, the practice intensified. Extra food was prepared and distributed. Water was placed near fountains and courtyards. The spiritual logic was that mercy shown during the holy month carried particular weight, and the animals on the street were included in the circle of recipients.

Extending kindness beyond pets

Ottoman compassion reached many species beyond cats and dogs.

Releasing birds

The Ottoman culture of care extended to other species. Kuş salma, the practice of buying caged birds from market sellers and releasing them while reciting prayers, was common across social classes. The act was understood as symbolic, aligning with the idea of freeing something constrained. Wratislaw recorded seeing this and, again, found it puzzling from within his own cultural framework.

Caring for kites and other birds

Large birds, particularly kites, were fed deliberately because they played a recognized role in urban sanitation. This was ecological awareness expressed through religious generosity rather than scientific language, but the outcome was the same.

Feeding fish and building fountains

Ottoman philanthropists built sebil, public water fountains, that served humans and animals alike. Caravanserais along major trade routes provided shelter and water not only for travelers but for their horses, mules, and camels. Charitable foundations, vakıf, sometimes specified in their endowments that funds be used for the care of street animals. The Gurabahane-i Laklakan, established in Bursa, was a hospital dedicated specifically to injured storks. It is among the earliest documented institutions of organized animal care in the world.

Abdülhamid II and the Dogs of Istanbul

By the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II in the late nineteenth century, Istanbul's street dogs had reached what historians describe as their most stable period. They were organized by district. Each pack had its territory. Residents knew their local dogs by sight. The dogs policed their boundaries and provided a form of neighborhood security at night.

When rabies became a concern in the city, Abdülhamid sent a delegation to Louis Pasteur in Paris and donated 10,000 gold coins to support Pasteur's rabies research. The result was the establishment of Istanbul's own Pasteur Institute, one of the first three in the world. The solution to the rabies question was vaccination and treatment, not elimination.

During this period, French industrialists and laboratory operators began requesting Ottoman street dogs for use in experiments and for the perfume and cosmetics industries, which required animal-derived compounds. Abdülhamid refused. The dogs of Istanbul were not for sale.

1910: Hayırsız Ada

In 1908, Abdülhamid was deposed. The İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, the Committee of Union and Progress, came to power with a program of radical modernization. Among their ambitions was remaking Istanbul in the image of a European capital. Street dogs, in their view, were an obstacle to this image.

The French offer was renewed. The new government accepted it.

In June 1910, under Interior Minister Talat Paşa and Istanbul mayor Suphi Bey, collection teams moved through the city. The workers were mostly day laborers, because ordinary residents refused the work. Metal tongs were used to seize the dogs by the neck or limbs. The animals were piled onto carts and taken to holding areas at Tophane on the European shore.

When word spread, residents acted. Groups stormed the Tophane enclosures and freed hundreds of dogs. The government stationed soldiers at the gates. Collection continued.

Around 80,000 dogs were gathered. The government then waited for France to send ships.

France did not send ships. After weeks of delay, France cancelled the agreement.

The government now held tens of thousands of dogs at Tophane with no plan. The financial and logistical strain was immediate. The decision that followed was to send the dogs to Sivriada, a small island in the Marmara Sea southeast of the Princes' Islands.

Sivriada was a bare rock. There were no trees, no freshwater sources, no vegetation. The dogs were loaded onto boats and left there.

Citizens rowed to the island with food for as long as they could sustain the effort. But 80,000 animals was a number far beyond what unorganized private charity could reach. The food deliveries became infrequent and then stopped.

The French journalist Robert Gillon passed near the island during this period. He wrote that as his boat approached, a terrible smell reached them from a distance, and then the sound: the howling of thousands of dogs, which he said carried a quality of human desperation. He described the surviving animals rushing to the shore when they saw the boat, calling out as if they understood that help might be close. His account was published in France in a journal called Le Journal, and the story spread in the European press.

The dogs died of hunger and thirst over a period of weeks. Those that lasted longer survived by eating those that died first.

The howling was said to carry across the water to the Asian shore at night. Istanbul residents sat with this sound.

When the Balkan War broke out in 1912, people connected it to what had been done. The language they used was that of ah, the curse that rises from a wronged soul. They said the dogs' suffering had brought judgment on the city.

The island has been called Hayırsız Ada since then. In official records the name is still Sivriada. In the city's language it is something else. A small memorial was placed there in 2012, on the centenary of the event.

This was not the only time dogs had been sent to Sivriada. In 1865, a British tourist fell from a wall while fleeing street dogs and died. Sultan Abdülaziz ordered the dogs collected and sent to the island. A fire broke out in Istanbul shortly after, and people associated it with the exile. The dogs were brought back. The pattern of attempted removal, public resistance, and reversal had already been established before 1910.

What changed in 1910 was the scale, and the abandonment.

What Foreigners Recorded

European travelers between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries wrote about Ottoman street animals with varying degrees of comprehension. The most consistent observation was surprise at the animals' ease and the humans' matter-of-fact generosity toward them. Dogs slept in busy market streets and were stepped around. Cats ate from dishes left by residents who then went inside without looking back.

Some travelers, like Wratislaw, dismissed what they saw as superstition. Others described it with something closer to admiration. Almost all noted that the behavior was systematic, culturally consistent across social classes, and clearly old.

What the travelers were observing was a culture in which the boundary between human and animal welfare was drawn differently than in most of Europe at the time.

This was not accidental variation. It had institutional support, religious grounding, and a commercial infrastructure in the form of the mancacılar.

A Note on Complexity

Ottoman history on this subject was not uniform. Animal cruelty existed in certain periods and certain contexts. Specific rulers ordered collections and relocations at various points. The tradition of care was dominant in the culture's self-understanding, but this did not mean every practice aligned with it.

The 1910 event sits at the intersection of these contradictions. It happened under a government that considered itself modernizing and progressive, acting in the name of European standards. What it produced was a mass death that the city's population experienced as a moral catastrophe.

The Tradition Today

The habits documented in Ottoman travel accounts are still visible in Turkish cities. Water bowls left on sidewalks. Food plates at the base of apartment buildings. Cat houses built by residents in parks and neighborhoods. The vakıf model has no direct descendant, but the impulse it institutionalized is still present in the behavior of ordinary people.

This is not nostalgia. The behavior predates Ottoman institutions and will likely outlast current political debates about stray animal policy. It is part of how this urban culture has organized its relationship with non-human life for centuries, and that is a long enough record to take seriously.

If you want to read about how this history intersects with Istanbul's contemporary cat culture and recent events, that post is here.

Turkish Vocabulary: Animals, Charity, and the City

The words below appear in historical and contemporary discussions of animal welfare in Turkey. Many of them carry cultural meaning beyond their dictionary definitions.

Turkish	English
merhamet	compassion, mercy
sadaka	charity, alms
vakıf	charitable foundation
hayır	good deed, charitable act
hayırsız	merciless, ungrateful
kuş salma	releasing a caged bird as an act of charity
mancacı	street vendor who sold cooked animal food
sebil	public water fountain (for humans and animals)
kervansaray	caravanserai, roadside inn for travelers and animals
sürgün	exile, deportation
itlaf	extermination, culling
ah	the curse that rises from a wronged soul
uğursuzluk	bad omen, misfortune
zulüm	cruelty, oppression
kamu vicdanı	public conscience
barınak	shelter, animal shelter
hayvansever	animal lover
hayvan hakları	animal rights
kısırlaştırma	neutering, sterilization
yaban hayatı	wildlife

A note on hayırsız: The word means merciless or ungrateful. The island where 80,000 dogs were left to die in 1910 is called Hayırsız Ada. The name was given by the people of Istanbul. It is still the name the city uses.

A note on ah: In Turkish, ah etmek means to sigh or grieve, but birinin ahını almak, to receive someone's curse of grief, carries moral weight. When people said the Balkan War was the dogs' ah, they were invoking a belief that injustice accumulates and eventually returns. The word appears in literature, in proverbs, and in everyday speech when someone speaks of a wrong that was never repaired.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: Did the Ottoman Empire have organized systems for animal care?

A: Yes. The vakıf system, charitable endowments, sometimes specified funds for street animal care. The mancacılar profession provided a commercial infrastructure for daily feeding. The Gurabahane-i Laklakan in Bursa was a dedicated hospital for injured storks. These were institutional, not improvised.

Q: What was the Gurabahane-i Laklakan?

A: A hospital in Bursa established during the Ottoman period to care for injured storks. It is among the earliest documented specialized animal care institutions anywhere in the world.

Q: What happened at Hayırsız Ada?

A: In 1910, the İttihat ve Terakki government collected approximately 80,000 street dogs from Istanbul with the intention of selling them to France. When France cancelled the agreement, the government sent the dogs to Sivriada, a bare rocky island in the Marmara Sea with no water or vegetation. Citizens attempted to bring food by boat. The dogs died. The island has been called Hayırsız Ada since then.

Q: Why does this history matter today?

A: Current debates in Turkey about stray animal policy, including the 2024 law that allowed euthanasia of collected animals, regularly reference this history. The events of 1910 function as a cultural reference point for what can happen when government policy overrides the public's relationship with street animals. The name Hayırsız Ada appears in contemporary protest language.