OLD DOGS AND YOUNG TURKS: THE SHIFTING PERCEPTION OF STREET DOGS DURING THE MODERNIZATION PERIOD OF OTTOMAN ISTANBUL

Abstract

After numerous unsuccessful attempts, both lethal and innocuous, to remove them from urban precincts, the dogs of Istanbul remain a source of anxiety and bitter contention in the Republic of Turkey. The conflict exists between a citizenry determined to maintain some continuity in their city’s heritage and the government, who express a political aversion for a perceived oriental dinginess that typifies the undeveloped cities of the world. After 400 years of uneventful human-canine coexistence in the city, the conflict arose during the modernization period of the late Ottoman Empire, stimulated by sweeping military and economic reforms in 1826 that changed the organization of city spaces into one of a European-style urban order. This research focuses on how perceived problem animals in urban spaces are framed, by both their supporters and opponents. In the Istanbul street dog case, the different framing of dogs throughout the late Ottoman period (1826-1910), in the Tanzimat Era (1839-1876), reflected the physical and ideological developments of modernization as the Empire collapsed. Throughout the upheaval and replacement of old institutions, street dogs (also an institution of the Ottoman era) were subjected to different rhetoric from reformers in the bureaucracy (like the Young Turks), public health officials, and the common people. Reformers of the Tanzimat Era and Second Constitutional Period (1910) framed dogs as regressive and morally corrupted creatures; doctors and other health officials approached them from an “objective” scientific standpoint that framed them as rodents carrying diseases; the people, however, protected (and continue to preserve in the Republic today) dogs as co-creations, endowed with inherent rights by a common Creator, to live in undisturbed parallel proximity as fellow residents of the ancient city.