The story goes like this. The Prophet Muhammad found Muezza asleep on the edge of his robe. He needed to get up. He also really did not want to wake her.

So he cut the sleeve off.

That’s the whole story, and it’s still the reason cats in Turkey get a level of respect most animals never see. There’s also a saying attributed to Muhammad after he watched a cat drink from a basin used for prayer washing: cats, he said, have the cleanest mouths around. Extremely generous read on a species that also licks itself in public, but the tradition stuck.

The Ottomans took that vibe and turned it into an actual government program. There was real money behind it — a charity fund called vakıf — and real employees called mancacı whose entire job was walking around feeding cats, dogs, and birds. Somewhere out there is the greatest job posting in human history and nobody wrote it down.

Cats also just happened to be useful, which never hurts. They kept mice out of libraries and grain stores, so nobody even needed to fake-love them — they were pulling their weight before anyone got sentimental about it. One sultan took it way past useful, though. Abdul Hamid II ran the empire from 1876 to 1909 and reportedly kept about 1,500 cats in his own palace. That’s not a pet collection. That’s a palace with a cat problem the sultan refused to call a problem.

Locals describe it with a rule that sounds made up until you’ve actually seen it work: a street cat belongs to everyone and no one, all at once. Nobody owns it. Everybody feeds it. It’s less a pet than a group project with whiskers, and somehow the whole city is still passing.

The habit never really died out. Turkey has its own native breeds now — the Turkish Angora and the Turkish Van. A 2016 documentary called “Kedi” put Istanbul’s street cats in front of the entire world. And in 2021, Turkey’s Constitutional Court made it official: cities are now legally required to look after their street animals. A thousand-year-old vibe, now enforceable by law.

Doesn’t mean it’s easy out there. Traffic, illness, bad winters — Istanbul’s cats deal with all the usual stuff, and rescue groups are constantly playing catch-up. But the baseline is still weirdly wholesome: in this one city, a cat with no owner somehow still isn’t alone.