A cat canteen in Istanbul: gentleness raised by one street
Retired schoolteacher Fatma puts out water and food for stray cats in a lane of Istanbul's old town; what begins with one woman grows into the shopkeepers and children of the whole street. This lane, she says, hasn't been raising cats — it's been raising us.
At six in the morning, in a cobbled lane of Istanbul's old town, Fatma, a retired schoolteacher, opens her blue wooden door on time, carrying a bowl of fresh water and a bag of cat food to the plane tree at the end of the lane.
"Meow —" a ginger cat appears from nowhere, then a second, then a third. Within minutes six or seven cats have formed a half circle and wait quietly for the food. Fatma crouches down and strokes each one, murmuring its name: little Sultan, Aisha, Fat Tail.
The ginger cat, little Sultan, was the first to come. Three years ago a family moved out of the lane and left him behind in the empty flat. Fatma watched from her window as he scratched at the window frame and cried for three days; her heart failed her, and she carried over a bowl of rice. She meant to feed him just that once. But the cat remembered the bowl, and the person, and the next day he was waiting at the door on time. Fatma told people later: "He was the first cat I ever fed — and he's the one who made me the manageress of a cat canteen."
There are more cats in this lane than people. Istanbul is the city every cat on earth envies — bowls at street corners kept full year-round, shelters under every eave. But Fatma believes that water and food alone are not enough. "You have to make them feel that someone here cares about them."
For the first few months she was the only one feeding them. The first to join was Ahmet — in his youth he had kept a cat named Sesame, and after the cat died he never kept another for twenty years. Putting out food for the lane's cats, he said, was making up for lost lessons. One day he too brought out a bag of cat food. "I have fish cans near their expiry date in the shop. A shame to throw them away." The young baker was more direct: every morning before the ovens opened, he packed the trimmings in a paper bag and hung it on the door handle. One weekend the children of the lane painted a wooden sign and hung it on the plane tree: "The lane's cat canteen — open 24 hours."
That was how the name "cat canteen" was coined, by the children.
Fatma has rules, quite a few of them: fixed feeding times, no food left overnight, cardboard boxes and old blankets under the tree in winter; even in the rain she crouches under the tree with an umbrella, never skipping a day. On her own porch she keeps a bowl that is never empty, with the words "Water first, then food." Cats are like people, she says: a meal now and a famine later is not love. Love is on time, every time.
There was discord, of course. A neighbor tried to talk her out of it: "You have a pension. Wouldn't it be better to volunteer at a welfare home? What's the point of feeding cats?" Fatma did not argue; she only asked: "If one day all the cats vanished from this city, tell me — which would disappear first, the cats, or the softness in people's hearts?" The neighbor had no answer. The next day, a water bowl appeared outside the neighbor's door.
Last winter was brutal. Ahmet added a heating pad to the cat shelter; Fat Tail hurt her leg when someone knocked her down, and Fatma carried her to the veterinary station. When the vet heard it was a cat from the lane's canteen, he flatly refused the money, asking only that she feed it an extra bowl of good food. All through that winter the baker baked twenty extra little fish. Fatma stood at the end of the lane and counted: seventeen cats, not one missing. She turned to Ahmet. "Look. This lane hasn't been raising cats. It's been raising us."
There are many ways to love a city, and the simplest one is to crouch down and give its wanderers a bowl of water.
In the end
Later, Fatma wrote the cat canteen's lessons on small cards and pasted them on lampposts throughout the old town: what time to feed, how to store the food, how to build winter shelters. People in other districts followed the cards and set out water bowls of their own. Tourists sometimes come looking for the cats; Fatma turns the cards over, and on the back are printed the name and story of every cat. Some cards get peeled off and kept by strangers; when she hears about it she is not annoyed, only says: "If people like them, it means this lane's gentleness has found its seeds." Cats can't speak, she says, but this city speaks for them — the gentlest city rules are never written in municipal documents, but in the "meow" of every early morning.