a city dog, tagged by the municipality (note yellow ear tag) lounges in front of Hagia Sofia, and a cat poses inside

…are an integral part of the urban streetscape dating back to Byzantium when street dogs served the sanitation service of street garbage disposal; with the dog population exploding in 1908, 40,000 were shipped to Island of Oxia to fend for themselves where few survived; later in 1937 it was reported in Time Magazine that 20,000 street dogs were cleared from the streets and euthanized, in 2004 a neuter and release program was instituted by the city, the implementation of which was criticized by the Animal Liberation Front, and in 2009 the Sunday’s Zaman reported that Istanbul started to tag the dogs who had been neutered and immunized – which my Istanbul friends seem to think has been successful and well organized – and now each neighborhood in the center has a few dogs in residence (locals know the names of each) who are collectively fed by the various shops, make themselves at home on the streets, and take walks around the city like any other resident – but it’s hard to know how the dogs feel about this arrangement – and as far as felines are concerned, it was a pleasure to meet a cute cross-eyed cat posing in one of the stained-glassed apses of Hagia Sophia, and even more impressive that most tourists (like me) were just as excited about photographing the cat as they were the interior of one of the biggest and most storied cathedrals in the world which we were visiting.