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Articles

The state and the stray dogs in late Ottoman Istanbul: from unruly subjects to servile friends

 

ABSTRACT

The present article situates the systemic efforts to annihilate stray dogs within the wider picture of Ottoman modernizing reforms in the nineteenth century. The period under investigation witnessed an increasing desire on the part of the modern Ottoman state to control and reform disenfranchised human and animal groups, which were believed to jeopardize public order, security and hygiene. These groups – beggars, orphans and the unemployed – were identified as actors irreconcilable with the modern image that the reforming bureaucracy and modernizing elites sought to project. In the face of increasing challenges from European powers, they were the epitome of underdevelopment and backwardness. Ottoman elites and official authorities therefore proposed and implemented institutional measures in the form of forced labor, reformatories or deportation to reform the conditions of these groups, segregate them from the greater public and discipline them. In the modern period, along with the proposals that called for the removal of dogs, modernizing intellectuals and professionals proposed alternative plans to render non-human animals beneficial to human needs and the modern state's expectations.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to the editors and anonymous reviewers of Middle Eastern Studies for their valuable comments and criticisms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. An animated movie by French-Armenian filmmaker Serge Avedikian that depicted the story of the stray dogs won the Best Short Film prize at the sixty-third Cannes Film Festival. Serge Avedikian, Barking Island, Animation, Short, History (2010).

2. Georges Goursat Sam, ‘L'Ile Aux Chiens’, Le Journal no.6582 (4 October 1910), p.1.

3. Cihangir Gündoğdu, The Animal Rights Movement in the Late Ottoman Empire in Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi (Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 2010), pp.373–95.

4. Georges Goursat Sam, in the article published in Le Journal, describes his meeting with Interior Minister Talat, one of the Ottoman masterminds of the Armenian Genocide, concerning the deportation of the dogs to the island of Oxia: ‘There were already some sinister noises on this island; it was pretended that these unfortunate beasts, deprived of water and food, devoured each other. But at a dinner offered to my friend by Talaat Bey, Minister of the Interior, and at which I was present, His Excellency assured us with a reassuring smile that this measure had been taken by Mouheddin Bey, governor of Pera; that thirty thousand francs had been voted by the Parliament for the maintenance of these dogs, that they were well cared for and fed at the expense of the State. We were quite reassured, and even touched at the thought of a Mount Athos of the dogs, of that ideal colony of good dogs, living free and happy on this Isola-Bella.’ Sam, ‘L'Ile Aux Chiens’, p.1.

5. For an evaluation of the perception of dogs in Islam, see Mikhail, ‘A Dog-Eat-Dog Empire: Violence and Affection on the Streets of Ottoman Cairo’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol.35, no.1 (January 1, 2015), pp.76–95; Alan Mikhail, ‘Animals as Property in Early Modern Ottoman Egypt’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient Vol.53, no.4 (1 October 2010), pp.621–52; Kim Fortuny, ‘Islam, Westernization, and Posthumanist Place: The Case of the Istanbul Street Dog’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Vol.21, no.2 (2014), pp.271–97.

6. Catherine Pinguet, İstanbul'un Köpekleri (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2009); Catherine Pinguet, Istanbul's Street Dogs at the End of the Ottoman Empire: Protection or Extermination in Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi (Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 2010), pp.353–71.

7. Cihangir Gündoğdu, ‘İstanbul Himaye-i Hayvanat Cemiyeti: Doksan Yıl Önce İstanbullu Hayvanseverler’, Toplumsal Tarih Vol.10, no.116 (August 2003), pp.10–7; Gündoğdu, The Animal Rights Movement in the Late Ottoman Empire.

8. Mikhail, ‘A Dog-Eat-Dog Empire: Violence and Affection on the Streets of Ottoman Cairo’; Alan Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

9. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, Animal Spaces, Beastly Places (London; New York: Routledge, 2000); Chris Pearson, ‘Dogs, History, and Agency’, History and Theory no.52 (December 2013), pp.128–45; Chris Pearson, ‘Between Instinct and Intelligence: Harnessing Police Dog Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Paris’, Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol.2, no.58 (2016), pp.463–90; Chris Pearson, ‘Canines and Contraband: Dogs, Nonhuman Agency and the Making of the Franco-Belgian Border During the French Third Republic’, Journal of Historical Geography Vol.54 (18 September 2016), pp.50–62; Aaron Herald Skabelund, Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World, 1st ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); N. Pemberton and M. Worboys, Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 18302000, 1st ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); Margo DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to HumanAnimal Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

10. Mikhail, ‘A Dog-Eat-Dog Empire: Violence and Affection on the Streets of Ottoman Cairo’.

11. İrvin Cemil Schick, ‘İstanbul'da 1910’da Gerçekleşen Büyük Köpek İtlâfı: Bir Mekân Üzerinde Çekişme Vakası’, Toplumsal Tarih no.200 (2010), pp.22–33.

12. Nazan Maksudyan, Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014); Nadir Özbek, ‘“Beggars” and “Vagrants” in Ottoman State Policy and Public Discourse, 1876–1914’, Middle Eastern Studies Vol.45, no.5 (September 2009), p.783; Kent F. Schull, Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

13. Schick, ‘İstanbul'da 1910’da Gerçekleşen Büyük Köpek İtlâfı: Bir Mekân Üzerinde Çekişme Vakası’.

14. Alan Mikhail, ‘A Dog-Eat-Dog Empire: Violence and Affection on the Streets of Ottoman Cairo’; Alan Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

15. A short biography of Saçaklızâde is available here: İbrahim Çetintaş, ‘Saçaklızâde ve İlimleri Sınıflandırması’ (PhD thesis, Ankara Üniversitesi, 2006).

16. Saçaklızâde, who was not sympathetic to any kind of dogs, in the pamphlet classifies dogs as attended (memlûk) and unattended (gayrı-memlûk). Based on this classification, he further categorizes dogs as harmful (muzır) and harmless (gayrı-muzır). Saçaklızade, Köpekler (Konstantiniye: Matba-i Ebuziya, 1304), p.6.

17. Ibid., p.7.

18. In the Ottoman army, special units such as turnacıbaşı, samsuncubaşı, zağarcıbaşı and segbanbaşı were created for the breeding and training of dogs. Tülay Artan, ‘A Book of Kings Produced and Presented as a Treatise on Hunting’, Muqarnas no.25 (2008), p.300. There are also several official correspondences in the Ottoman archives that record orders concerning the expenditures on and provisioning of dogs and the various breeds employed in the Ottoman army. C. SH., 132/6637, 13 Muharrem 1216; C. AS., 16/671, 25 Zilhicce 1191; C. AS., 91/4195, 4 Safer 1207.

19. One may observe the presence of domesticated dog breeds on several occasions that extended from royal hunting feasts to foreign diplomatic missions, and their frequent use in the countryside as sheep or watch dogs. In a painting by George Engelhardt Schöder, a Swedish painter, which portrays Ottoman ambassador Mehmet Said Efendi, Efendi's diplomatic retinue to Sweden, one would quickly notice the dog at the forefront of the diplomatic mission and also realize that Mehmet Said Efendi is pointing to the dog. ‘Mehmed Said Efendi and His Retinue’, accessed 1 February 2017, http://www.peramuseum.org/Artwork/Mehmed-Said-Efendi-and-his-Retinue/93/15.

20. According to the Ottoman chronicler Naima, Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I's (r. 1603–1617) vizier Nasuh Paşa ordered the deportation of stray dogs from the capital, and consequently boats full of dogs disembarked them in Üsküdar, on the Asian side of the city. Mehmed İpşirli, ed., Târih-i Na’îmâ (Vol.2, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2007), p.417.

21. Robert Walsh, A Residence at Constantinople (Vol.1, London: F. Westley & A.H. Davis, 1836), p.248.

22. Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt.

23. For the occurrences of epidemics and subsequent sanitary measures implemented in the Ottoman Empire, see Daniel Panzac, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda Veba: 1700--1850 (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 1997); Yaron Ayalon, Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire Plague, Famine, and Other Misfortunes (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Nükhet Varlık, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347--1600 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Kathryn Linnea Kranzler and Graduate Program in History, ‘Health Services in the Late Ottoman Empire (1827–1914)’ (Boğaziçi University, 1991).

24. Robert Walsh, A Residence at Constantinople (Vol.2, London: F. Westley & A.H. Davis, 1836), p.258.

25. Ibid., Vol.2, pp.268–69.

26. C. SH., 26/1255, 21 Zilhicce 1254 [7 March 1839].

27. Walsh, A Residence at Constantinople, 1836, Vol.2, p.269.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., Vol.2, pp.269–70.

30. For a collection of municipal regulations concerning public ways, see Mehmet Seyitdanlıoğlu, Tanzimat Döneminde Modern Belediyeciliğin Doğuşu: Yerel Yönetim Metinleri (İstanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2010).

31. Avi Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts: Law and Modernity, 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Gülnihal Bozkurt, ‘The Reception of Western European Law in Turkey (From the Tanzimat to the Turkish Republic, 1839–1939)’, Der Islam Vol.75, no.2 (1998), pp.283–95.

32. John A. S Bucknill and Haig Apisoghom Utidjian, The Imperial Ottoman Penal Code (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), p.199.

33. Ibid., p.201.

34. Ibid., pp.203–4.

35. Osman Ergin, Mecelle-i Umûr-i Belediyye, (Vol.5, İstanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür İşleri Daire Başkanlıǧı, 1995), p.2482.

36. Ibid., Vol.5, p.2375.

37. Osman Nuri Ergin, Mecelle-i Umûr-ı Belediyye (Vol.6, İstanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür İşleri Daire Başkanlıǧı, 1995), p.3355.

38. Osman Ergin, Mecelle-i Umûr-ı Belediyye (Vol. 6, İstanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür İşleri Daire Başkanlıǧı, 1995), pp.3239–40.

39. Osman Ergin, Mecelle-i Umûr-ı Belediyye (4th ed, İstanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür İşleri Daire Başkanlıǧı, 1995), pp.1679–70.

40. Ibid., p.2086.

41. Saçaklızade, Köpekler, p.3.

42. İkdâm, no.2328 (20 December 1900), p.3.

43. ‘Kuduz Kedi’, İkdâm no.2029 (24 February 1900), p.2.

44. ‘Yine Kuduz Köpek’, İkdâm, no.3133 (29 May 1900), p.3.

45. Nuran Yıldırım, A History of Health Care in Istanbul, trans. M. İnanç Özekmekçi (İstanbul: Düzey Matbaacılık, 2010), p.127.

46. Ibid., p.128; Besim Ömer, Nevsâl-i Afiyet (Dersaadet [Istanbul], 1899), p.96.

47. Besim Ömer, Nevsâl-i Afiyet, p.96.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., p.98.

50. Following the foundation of the rabies institute, the number of patients coming from the provinces for treatment increased. Police records contain several sets of correspondence concerning rabies cases that occurred in the provinces and the expenditures for patients who received treatment in the capital. ZB., 87/55, 06/01/1325 records the travel expenses of Fatma daughter of Mustafa, who received treatment in the capital. ZB., 87/56, 04/02/1323 concerns the case of Karabet son of Ohannes, who was bitten by a rabid dog. Another correspondence informs the authorities with respect to the transfer of travel expenses of patients sent to the institute for treatment. ZB., 87/59, 01/07/1323.

51. DH. İ. UM. EK., 29/124, 8 Cemaziyelahir 1335 [1 April 1917]

52. DH. MKT., 679/15, 3 Muharrem 1321 [1 April 1903]

53. Abdullah Cevdet, İstanbul'da Köpekler (Mısır: Matba-i İctihad, 1909); Pinguet, İstanbul'un Köpekleri, p.58.

54. Ebuziyya, ‘İstanbul Köpekleri’, Yeni Tasvîr-i Efkâr no.333 (3 May 1910), p.1.

55. Ibid.

56. Palmira Brummett, Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–1911 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), p.261.

57. ‘Cemiyet-i Umumiye-i Beldiye’, Tanîn no.569 (3 April 1910), p.3.

58. DH. MUİ., 97-2/8, 27 Cemaziyelevvel 1328 [6 June 1910].

59. DH. MUİ., 97-2/8, 27 Cemaziyelevvel 1328 [6 June 1910].

60. HR. TO., 540/52, 19 July 1910; HR. TO., 540/65, 10 August 1910.

61. Gündoğdu, The Animal Rights Movement in the Late Ottoman Empire.

62. By 1915, in spite of all the measures to eradicate stray dogs, official correspondence suggests that rabies and deaths from hydrophobia were on the rise. The increase in cases of rabies was attributed to the negligence of local authorities in annihilating rabid dogs, which were believed to communicate disease to other dogs and finally to humans. In an official communication dated 4 November 1915, the Ministry of the Interior's Directorate of Health recorded a total of 1535 (750 soldiers and 756 civilians) cases of rabies in 1914 and confirmed a rise in rabies cases in comparison to past years. The general director of health in the same document attributed the rise to a lack of assiduousness in collecting dogs on the part of officials and the lack of capacity to address cases of rabies by the rabies treatment institution, and thus called for the ‘collection and destruction of unattended dogs’ to be brought to the attention of municipal authorities and executed in the surrounding provinces. ZB., 41/23, 09/12/1323; DH. EUM. MEM., 30 Zilhicce 1333 [8 November 1915].

63. DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies, p.147.

64. While in the period before the nineteenth century, certain dog breeds were kept and raised by the Ottoman elite, in the nineteenth century, this trend evolved into a more systematic and professional occupation. The Scottish writer and traveler Charles Macfarlane describes having met one of the members of the Karaosmanoğlu family, a notable local magnate, and seeing ‘four fine strong greyhounds in leash, and carefully protected from the cool air of the morning by body wrappers’. He notes, ‘the dogs I have seen in these districts are rather large, and not so delicately formed as our beautiful English breed of greyhounds; they are rather rough-haired, have thicker ears and tails, and do not show by any means the high blood ours do. To judge from having seen them run two or three times, I should say that they were not so fleet as our dogs, but stronger and capable of more work. They are generally dark coloured, and frequently quite black, but I saw two at Casabar of a delicate cream colour. I offered the Turk they belonged to a high price for one of them, but he would not sell it. The best breeds of the Turkish greyhounds come from Angora, a place which seems always to have been celebrated for dogs, cats, and goats.’ Charles MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828 (Vol.1, Saunders and Otley, 1829), pp.384–85.

65. Abdülhamid II's daughter Princess Ayşe in her memoirs recalls the cats and dogs that were kept at the palace, which further attests her father's interest in pet animals. The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem (1st ed, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010), p.155.

66. Y. PRK. EŞA., 17/34, 30 Ramazan 1310 [17 April 1893].

67. Y. PRK. EŞA., 4/44, 6 Rebiülevvel 1332 [21 May 1904].

68. Y. PRK. M., 3/74, 26 Receb 1314 [31 December 1896].

69. Y. PRK. TM., 50/73., 18 Zilhicce 1325 [22 January 1908].

70. In his memoirs, Victor Eskenazi recalls the story of their pet dog, which was poisoned by the municipality. Victor Eskenazi, Beyond Constantinople: The Memoirs of an Ottoman Jew (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016).

71. ‘Hayvanseverlere Tuhfe’, Şehbal no.24 (14 August 1910), p.482.

72. Y. PRK. SGE., 11/120, 28 Rebiyülevvel 1330 [17 March 1912].

73. Pearson, ‘Between Instinct and Intelligence: Harnessing Police Dog Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Paris’.

74. Ferdan Ergut, Modern Devlet ve Polis: Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet'e toplumsal denetimin diyalektiği (Istanbul: Iletisim, 2004).

75. Pearson, ‘Between Instinct and Intelligence: Harnessing Police Dog Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Paris’, p.471.

76. ‘Polis Köpekleri-I’, Polis Mecmuası no.1 (14 July 1913), pp.11–4.

77. ‘Polis Köpekleri-II’, Polis Mecmuası, no.2 (14 August 1913), pp.38–41.

78. ‘Polis Hidematında Köpeklerden İstifade’, Polis Mecmuası no.4 (14 March 1915), pp.5–10.

79. ‘Berlin Zabıtasına Aid Tasvirden’, Polis Mecmuası no.65 (23 March 1916), p.36.

80. ‘Berlin Zabıtasına Aid Tasvirden’, Polis Mecmuası no.67 (14 May 1916), p.84.

81. Ahmed Nazmi, Hayvan Yetiştirme Fazileti (İstanbul: Matbaa-i Amire, 1922).

82. Cafer Fahri, Ev ve Salon Köpekleri (İstanbul: Matbaa-i Ebuziya, 1927).

83. Ibid., p.4.

84. Curtis Wager-Smith, Hayvan Arkadaşlar, trans. Süleyman Hurşit (İstanbul: Maarif Kitabhanesi, 1927).

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