Spending a short holiday, and of course, seeing all the fabled sights of this fabulous city.
Back one day from several hours on a cruise up the Bosphorus, Lynne and I settled in to some comfortable sofas in a restaurant called Pallatium (or something like that) with a glass floor that looks down on to an excavated palace and a view of the street. It was the latter that fascinated us an in particular, a bright, intelligent, dog who looks very much like this one:
(Note the tagged ear. See below for explanation.)
To me, it seemed as if the dog belonged to the shop-keeper, but after half an hour or so, he was given a treat enclosed in a package. The dog received the gift, and after playing with it, trying to extract it from its wrapping, it trotted up the street to solve the puzzle at leisure. About twenty minutes later, strolling up the same street, we found him lying on the step of the Seven Hills Hotel and Restaurant (which, by the way, has an amazing view).
There the doorman engaged us in a lengthy conversation about his relatives in Toronto and many other matters, during which we learned that the dog belonged to nobody. The tag indicated that he had been rounded up, neutered, and inncoulated . . . and returned to the street where he lived his happy life as a ward of the neighbourhood.
The dogs of Istanbul are famous, it turns out. Orhan Pamuk paints a piteous picture of them:
They are the bane of the city council: when the army stages a coup, it is only a matter of time before a general mentions the dog menace; the state and the school system have launched campaign after campaign to drive dogs from the streets, but still they roam free. Fearsome as they are, united as they have been in their defiance of the state, I can't help pitying these mad, lost creatures still clinging to their old turf.
The first bit is certainly true. In fact, there is a proposal currently before the city government to round up all the dogs and ship them off city limits to reserved areas—an interesting account of the proposal here. But the second part is apparently not. The citizens of this friendly city take loving care of their dogs, many of whom are communal pets. (See here.) The dogs are not (at least not today) "mad, lost creatures," or anything like "fearsome."
It has occurred to me that I am romanticizing these dogs, and of course I am—not to mention exoticizing Istanbul. Still the stray dogs I saw seem to have a better life than my own dog. Mine is dependent on Lynne and me for every single thing. We even have to take her out to pee. If we both got struck down by a tram, our dog would starve to death, having first fouled our apartment for many days. The dogs of Istanbul seem free to roam. And they do: by repute, they know to cross the road only on a green light. The only thing they lack is money to buy food. And the collective care of the citizens seems to take care of this.
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