Heartwarming, harmonious portraits of Istanbul’s street cats

No one is quite sure how many cats there are in Istanbul, though it’s certain that there are a lot. Estimates range from 125,000 to over one million, but walk around the city’s streets, and their presence is felt everywhere. They strut through dense markets, line walls and pavements, and guard entrances, while others sleep in man-made shelters built for especially for them.

While technically, the street cats are mostly strays if understood by western definitions, in reality they are cared for by the various local communities of Türkiye’s most populous city, and they are pets of all. ​“People put food and water out for them,” says photographer Marcel Heijnen, whose latest photobook City Cats of Istanbul captures a handful of the city’s feline population, set among the backdrop of the city’s streets and stores. ​“The community takes care of the cats, and I think that comes from those times when it was a necessity.”

Humans and cats have a cohabitative, mutually beneficial relationship that dates back to around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, which spans areas of the modern day Middle East, including Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, southern Türkiye and Egypt. In ancient cities, humans discovered that cats were expert hunters who were able to keep their food supplies safe from rodents and other pests. In return, the felines were provided with food, shelter and water in exchange, which has led to their gradual domestication through the centuries.

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And in Istanbul specifically, the cats were so crucial to keeping the city’s food supplies safe that in the Ottoman era, local foundations hired people to work full-time as Mancaci (which translates literally to ​‘cat sitter’), whose jobs were to ensure that local cats were fed and kept alive. ​“I don’t know how necessary [cats] are right now,” Heijnen continues. ​“But it’s still intertwined in a way – the appreciation of them.”

While Heijnen’s photography work is varied, exploring urban landscapes and the intersection between architecture and culture, he’s most known for his work documenting cats, having published two previous photobooks on the Shop Cats of Hong Kong and the Shop Cats of China. His latest is a continuation of that work, though the cats’ omnipresence presented a different challenge to the previous projects.

“In Istanbul, it’s almost quantity over quality in a way,” he explains. ​“Cats are everywhere – you sit in a coffee place and there’ll be a cat next to you on a stool. Sometimes that’s interesting to photograph, sometimes it doesn’t have enough of the DNA of the city that I look for. So you can take thousands of photos, there’s hundreds of thousands of cats, so it’s harder to find them in a setting that tells you about Istanbul.”

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Made across a period of four weeks of intense shooting, with hours on end spent walking trawling the city’s streets with his camera, the photographs present a story of cats living harmoniously within Istanbul’s distinctive urban setting. There’s cats hanging around people who care for them, while others appear in bookshops, on intricate rugs, or next to buskers in the Metro. 

The book’s cover image features a long-haired calico cat, who Heijnen felt a particular affinity with. ​“Her name is Madame Caki,” he says. ​“I would hang out with that cat at the mosque at dusk, and when the light would change she followed me around and posed in certain ways – there’s even a photo where she sits under the sign that [translates] to ​‘God’ in Arabic.”

Cats have historically been considered as special animals under the Islamic religion, and are protected by law in Türkiye, though new legislation introduced in 2024 allowed euthanasia of stray cats and dogs that were terminally ill. Public protests and outcry saw cats removed from the initial bill, though the act became law for dogs, while some reports allege that cats have been either rounded up or even killed as a result of its eventual passing.

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But in the outcry is demonstrated the deep-rooted love for their feline companions in Istanbul, where they are continued to be cared for, just as they have been for millennia. ​“There’s an appreciation of the moment [when people interact with cats],” Heijnen says. ​“Cities are built for people, but there’s a lot of wildlife – there’s also seagulls and other animals – and we tend to forget that. I think it’s nice that it all merges together in a place like Istanbul, cars take a slower speed because they know a cat or dog could cross the road, and there’s an appreciation of other species other than ourselves.”

City Cats of Istanbul by Marcel Heijnen is published by Thames & Hudson.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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