Hedgehogs, Van Cats, and Ottoman Bureaucrats

Chris Gratien, Georgetown University

During an outdoor session of an Ottoman paleography class last year at Yıldız University in Istanbul, which is on the grounds of Abdul Hamid II's Yıldız Palace, a hedgehog waddled up to our table, adding a little excitement to an already thoroughly exciting afternoon of reading photocopied paperwork from the desk of some nineteenth-century bureaucratic. "What is this animal doing in the middle of Beşiktaş" I thought to myself, and like any good historian, immediately recalled a document I had encountered at the Başbakanlık archives weeks before when I should have been reading something more important.

In the document was contained a list of rare or "never before seen" (nadide) animals sent from the governor of Adana in 1873 by request of the palace of Sultan Abdülaziz to join the imperial menagerie in Istanbul. The local animals that made the list were 5 francolins (turaç), 5 hakkuran (a special type of dove), 6 chamois (yağmurca, see here), and 4 hedgehogs (kirpi). The tone in the document saying "a type of animal referred to as a hedgehog" and "a bird called hakkuran" suggested that these animals had been quite foreign to Istanbul, truly nadide as indicated by the attached documentation. Could the hedgehog we were looking at be a descendant of the 4 Adana hedgehogs sent to Istanbul almost 140 years ago?

Probably not. But still it is interesting to think about what happened to the animals that were brought to the imperial center as gifts. For example, Abdul Hamid II seems to have received a large number of cats at Yıldız Palace over the years. In 1885, the governor of Van sent 35 of what might have been Van cats, a landrace of small, white cats with different colored eyes native to the Lake Van region, to the Sultan. Perhaps Abdul Hamid requested these cats because he just thought it would be awesome to have thirty-five little white Van cats jumping all over him or swimming in the palace fountain.

Certainly owning such a rare cat would be a status symbol. But it turns out that Abdul Hamid received a few installments of cats during that decade. In 1889, he received 29 tabby (tekir) and "squirrel (sincap)" (?marmalade?) cats from Ankara that had been hand-picked from a group of more than one-hundred of the city's choicest felines, which were reportedly the biggest in the Empire.

We wouldn't want to draw too many conclusions based on the fact that men with lots of money and power wanted to collect rare pets, a phenomenon that seems to be common both in past and present times. However, it's worth considering that during the period of centralization of the Ottoman periphery in places like Adana and Van that had previously been quite distant from the Ottoman state, sending the local fauna to the imperial center might have symbolized a new relationship wherein the particular bounties of each province would be come part of the Ottoman whole. Nevermind that's bs nobody needs an excuse to post a picture of a cat on the internet anyway. 

Source: BOA, Y-PRK-UM 8/27 (19 M 1303); 13/120 (29 Ca 1306); Y-PRK-BŞK 15.6 (14 C 1306)

animals

NO MORE ANIMALS!