The beautiful feral dogs and cats of Istanbul

I have learned from international travel, that nothing makes your people, city, region or nation look more polite or civilized than the simple act of giving up your seat on public transit for a person who might need it. Despite my fitness and obvious mobility, I am always amazed at how often some transit passenger will stand up and insist I take their seat on some crowded transit.  In China, they often made me laugh as they would sometimes not take no, thanks for an answer.  In Budapest, I saw a kind woman get up to offer her seat to a woman who appeared to be pregnant.  But apparently, she was just dreadfully fat around her equator and did not take kindly to the kind gesture.

But another thing that will make any place seem truly civilized is feral cats and dogs that are well cared for instead of being diseased, sick and starving.  There are some dogs all through the city which are homeless, and thousands of cats.  One sees dry and wet catfood in trays constantly, and men sharing their food with cats and even being gentle and affectionate with them

I am not sure whether this dog was homeless or not. It was in a small village on the Bosphorus (at Amara sea) right at the entrance to the Black sea.  It was just photogenic, so I shot it.

This man was the god of many cats - more than shown in the photograph. They fought to sit in his lap on this sunny morning near Taksim square.  There are five shown here: an orange one to the right of the old man, just below another giving itself a good chin-scratch, two lounging on the right, and the black cat who thought it should walk right over and visit me.  But in front of the man, is a cat actually lying stretched and comfortably on the man's glass bathroom scale.  For some reason, in Turkey, people will pay to be weighed as they walk along the street, and the cat is impeding the man'c commercial aspirations.

Each time I passed the entrance to the wonderful Topkapi palace, this shepherd was always guarding the guard.

There are even cat families down among the huge granite boulders placed along the coast of the Amara sea. If you look closely at the bottom right of the sea/ship photo, you will see this family of kitten just sticking out from the rocks.  There is a fast coastal highway between these rocks and the city. I don't know how the cats can cross it.  But there are a lot of homeless men actually living on top of these rocks, and fishermen who seem to feed the cats something.

The great Aya Sophia was a church, then a mosque, and since 1930 is classed as a museum.  It is inhabited by cats as well.  Over at the grand Blue Mosque, I saw various dogs casually strolling through the grounds without a care.