On a cliff above the Mediterranean, another Antalya cat watches sunlight touch the eastern slopes. She’s a dusty old queen perched a hundred feet above blue water, overlooking the sunrise on the Taurus Mountains. It’s my first visit to Turkey—or Türkiye, since its April 2022 name change. Its unofficial designation, however, is as a byway in the worldwide cat reverence zone.
I admit to a weakness for feline charisma, but here, the cats’ charm and extroversion are uncanny. By comparison, my fickle floof at home merely tolerates the dog and her delight can only be coaxed out with ice cream and the smell of a fresh cardboard box.
A few years ago, I traveled to do research in the West Bank, where my novel The Skin and Its Girl is partly set; it’s about the queer women of a Palestinian soap-making dynasty, and one of the soap factories bears my maternal family’s surname. But while there, I also saw my grandfather’s gravelly affection for cats magnified across entire cities. Not since that trip have I felt such comfort in the sight of so many cats luxuriating on two-thousand-year-old stonework, and, as I make my way around the country now, one peers out of a courtyard built before the Roman Empire fell.
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