Why İstanbul Is Full Of Cats: Inside The City’s Centuries-Old Love Affair With Strays

In April 2026, when the Turkish Grand Prix’s return to the F1 calendar was announced with great fanfare from the Dolmabahçe Palace, Red Bull driver Yuki Tsunoda took a historic race car for a promotional run through İstanbul’s streets—cameras rolling, waterfront gleaming, every frame calculated for maximum spectacle. And then, uninvited and utterly unbothered, a stray cat wandered up to the car, paused to give it a proper once-over, and sauntered off as if filing a routine inspection report. The clip went viral within hours, out-charming the car, the driver, and the sponsors combined. Foreign fans called it “an ordinary day in İstanbul.” They weren’t wrong. It was a fittingly absurd, thoroughly İstanbul moment: even a global sporting spectacle must yield the right of way to a local cat.

That single sighting captures something the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency (TGA) has been thinking about deeply—how a city famous for empires, minarets, and a strait separating two continents has, somewhere along the way, adopted an entirely different set of ambassadors: four-pawed, free-roaming, and utterly indifferent to protocol. We asked TGA to walk us through the story of İstanbul’s cats—part urban legend, part civic institution, and, increasingly, a genuine reason travellers fall for the city.

A Bond Written Into The City’s Bones

The relationship long predates Instagram. “İstanbul’s unique relationship with its feline residents is shaped by a deep urban heritage stretching from the Eastern Empire to the Ottoman Era, alongside the city’s global mobility as a strategic port for centuries,” TGA told Outlook Traveller. “Yet its most profound driver lies in the city’s living culture of philanthropy and community care, a multilayered story that continues to thrive today.”

While cats carried ominous superstition in many parts of the world, İstanbul told a different story. TGA explained that archaeological evidence shows cats were fully woven into Ottoman urban life, guarding homes, shops, granaries, and libraries from rodents, while religious and cultural values encouraging kindness towards animals meant cats were welcomed in mosque courtyards, bazaars, and neighbourhood streets alike. Charitable foundations dedicated to feeding street animals cemented the habit into everyday civic life—not a quirky exception, but an institution.

The proof is scattered through the archives. As far back as 1591, a bewildered Czech nobleman named Wenceslas Wratislaw wrote home from İstanbul that “cats generally gather here and wait at certain hours for people to come and give them alms.” He couldn’t quite explain what he was seeing, but he was watching something already centuries old: dedicated feeders known as mancacı once walked the streets selling offal and liver so residents could buy food for stray cats, dogs, and birds, or simply hand over coins so the mancacı would feed the animals on their behalf, in the name of God. Even İstanbul’s grand National Library in Beyazıt earned an unofficial nickname—the “Cat Library”—after a 20th-century director quietly took hundreds of resident cats under his wing. And no one embodied the imperial end of this devotion quite like Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who, by some accounts, kept nearly 1,500 cats of assorted breeds roaming the grounds of Yıldız Palace during his reign.

That inheritance is still visible today in the wooden-house lanes of Balat and Kuzguncuk, and it has slipped just as comfortably into the espresso-and-vintage-shop energy of Cihangir and Moda. As TGA put it, “the bond between humans and cats in İstanbul should not be seen merely as a recent, endearing urban habit, but as a rich city culture shaped over centuries.”

From Neighbourhood Fixture To Global Celebrity

Ask any İstanbullu, and they’ll tell you cats have always simply been there—curled on a turnstile in the winter chill, trotting behind a shopkeeper carrying a bag of kibble, presiding over a cardboard shelter someone built them on a street corner. What has changed, TGA noted, isn’t the presence of the cats themselves but how visible that relationship has become to the rest of the world, thanks to travel photography, documentaries, and an endless scroll of social content.

No single film did more for that visibility than “Kedi,” Ceyda Torun’s gently observational 2016 documentary that followed seven street cats and the humans who quietly look after them. It became a surprise box-office hit, grossing over five million dollars worldwide.

Some cats have gone on to become genuine local legends in their own right. Gli spent all sixteen years of her life in the Hagia Sophia, and became a worldwide sensation in 2009 when former US President Barack Obama, on a state visit, was filmed giving her an unhurried scratch behind the ears. By the time she died of old age in 2020, she had well over 100,000 Instagram followers and was buried in the mosque’s own courtyard, with the city’s presidential spokesperson assuring the public that cats would always be welcome there. 

Then there’s Tombili, İstanbul’s most photographed loafer, immortalised in bronze in Kadıköy in the exact slouched pose—elbow on the pavement, utterly unbothered—that made her an internet star; the petition for her statue gathered some 17,000 signatures in under two months.

And İstanbul’s cats have a habit of gate-crashing the world stage entirely uninvited. In 2018, a ginger stray sauntered onto the pitch during a Champions League tie between Beşiktaş and Bayern Munich, stopping play for several minutes while stewards chased it in vain; ESPN later described its performance as “more Garfield than Sylvester.” Beşiktaş were fined by UEFA for the interruption, but Bayern’s own fans voted the cat man of the match. 

Remarkably, that same stadium cat resurfaced in 2026 at the Europa League final between Aston Villa and Freiburg, having apparently talked its way into permanent residency at the ground somewhere along the way. 

These days, the city’s cats turn up just as readily at symphony concerts, ballet performances, and theatre productions, and Galata even has a dedicated Cat Museum celebrating the whole affair.

Although there’s no official tally of travellers who book a flight purely for the cats, TGA admitted, the evidence is everywhere—self-styled “feline fanciers” now travel specifically to what online communities affectionately call “Catstanbul,” camera in hand, hunting not monuments but whiskers. And then there are the moments no marketing team could script, like Tsunoda’s unplanned co-star. As TGA put it, “such unexpected encounters going viral only highlight the unfettered, natural place cats hold in İstanbul’s everyday life on a global stage.”

For younger travellers raised on social feeds rather than guidebooks, this matters more than it might seem. TGA argued that a cat dozing on a ferry bench or holding court on a theatre stage becomes, in its words, “an authentic, distinctly İstanbul experience that no itinerary could ever script.” The cats aren’t the whole reason to visit—but they colour the memory of the trip in a way glossy landmark shots rarely do. In TGA’s assessment, this positions İstanbul not merely as a “magnificent historic metropolis, but as a modern, welcoming city full of playful surprises, warmth, and a living culture where humans and animals naturally share the same rhythm.”

The Unofficial Ministry Of Whiskers

Behind every cat napping picturesquely on a café chair is a surprisingly organised support system. TGA described the care of İstanbul’s street cats as resting on “a multilayered support network that blends municipal veterinary services with the dedicated efforts of residents, volunteers, local vets, and non-governmental organisations.”

Local municipalities handle the clinical side—check-ups, vaccinations, parasite control, and sterilisation—after which treated cats are registered and, if not adopted, returned to their home turf, a practice that keeps the population humane and sustainable rather than simply removing animals from the streets they know. Mobile emergency teams operate around the clock for injured or distressed cats. The scale of the effort is genuinely striking: City Hall sterilised more than 43,000 cats in a single recent year, roughly twelve times the number it managed back in 2015. Even public transport has adapted—cats, dogs, and small pets travelling with their carers are now allowed to ride the metro, buses, and ferries free of charge.

But the real backbone, TGA insisted, is civic habit. Bowls of water left outside shopfronts, hand-built shelters tucked into alley corners, informal phone trees for reporting an animal in distress—these small, unglamorous rituals are “among the most visible expressions of İstanbul’s deeply rooted neighbourhood solidarity.” A stray cat in İstanbul is rarely truly alone; it usually has several unofficial guardians within a hundred metres, right down to the named regulars who live inside a particular bookstore or ceramics shop and are treated as staff in all but salary.

That popularity, of course, invites a note of caution. TGA is candid that visitor enthusiasm needs boundaries—feeding cats appropriate food, respecting their space, and letting them initiate contact rather than the other way around. Getting this right, the agency said, is what keeps the exchange “positive and enriching for both travellers and cats.”

How To Be A Good Guest In A Cat’s City

Ask TGA for the one encounter that sums up İstanbul’s relationship with its cats, and the answer isn’t dramatic at all—which is rather the point. It’s a cat claiming an empty café chair and nobody shooing it off; a shopkeeper’s daily ritual of setting down a fresh bowl of water; a ferry cat curled into its usual spot, tolerated by commuters the way you’d tolerate a slightly territorial regular. “Here, cats are neither mere strays nor cute props for tourist photos,” TGA said. “They are recognised as genuine neighbours and an integral part of everyday life.”

That, more than any statue or viral clip, is the real charm of Catstanbul. The city has never staged this relationship for an audience. “The magic of İstanbul lies in the way the connection between people and cats isn’t played up for show—it is quiet, understated, and seamlessly woven into the flow of life,” TGA said. “At the heart of it all, our priority is to treat these cats not as tourist attractions, but as fellow citizens of the city.”

So the next time you’re wandering İstanbul’s backstreets and a cat blinks lazily at you from a sunlit windowsill, resist the urge to think of it as a photo op. Consider it, instead, an invitation—one extended by a city that has spent centuries perfecting the art of sharing its streets, its shopfronts, and quite possibly its heart, with animals it has never stopped calling neighbours.

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