Glen Johnson finds the purrfect destination for cat lovers – the city of Van in Turkey, where a rare breed is living large.
They have to be the luckiest cats in the world. Their villa – replete with two dining halls – sits on the shores of a cerulean lake, mountain ranges jutting skyward in the distance.
Silver bowls are scattered throughout the property, overflowing with cat biscuits.
Ladders afford access to cubby holes, lovingly kitted out with cushions and painted in pastel pinks and blues.
Tunnels link indoor and outdoor play areas, male and female dining rooms. Feline guests, meantime, bunk down in the on-site cat hotel. But that is not all.
The hundreds of cats living in this Kedi Evi, or cat house, have three custom-built swimming pools.
‘‘These cats are very rare because they love to swim,’’ says Abdullah Kaya, a veterinarian who oversees the Van Cat Research Centre.
In the city of Van in Turkey’s easternmost expanse, these snow white felines with large, odd coloured eyes – one blue and the other amber – are the famed Cats of Van, whose numbers have once again been bolstered, after years of decline.
‘‘There was a risk that these cats would [become] extinct,’’ says Kaya, sipping tea in his office. ‘‘We established this centre in 1992 to protect them.’’
The centre had a mere 30 pure-bred cats when it opened.
Now it is home to about 300 – hundreds more have been sold or given away to new owners.
Tourists flock to the villa, greeted by a giant cat sculpture outside, cooing to the cats, which vary in age from 10 days to 20 years.
Their long vertical ears, protruding cheeks, round faces and silky white hair mark them as unique, Kaya says. But it is their affability that really characterises them.
‘‘They build strong emotional connections,’’ he says. ‘‘You will never get the same connection with other cats.’’
They certainly are friendly. A stream of cats in a central play area bump and bound, making a dash for the gathered tourists’ outstretched hands.
A young cat’s head pops up from a hatch linking the area to one of the living rooms. It races across the floor, clambers up a chair and comes face to face with a young child, then sneezes. One cat clambers up the wire fence surrounding the area.
Another, a stern look on its face, sneaks off to a litterbox, where it scrapes away.
The centre is found at the Yuzuncu Yil University on the eastern shores of Lake Van, a saline-soda and endorheic lake that has been central to cultures such as the ancient Urartu, the Armenian Kingdom, over millennia.
Now Van has a strong Kurdish identity. Turkey’s south-east has been roiled by war since the breakdown three years ago of peace talks between Ankara and a Kurdish insurgent group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which seeks greater rights for the country’s sizeable Kurdish minority.
Van has been largely spared the violence convulsing this nation, although its tourism sector has suffered considerably, according to local tourism operators.
In that context, the Kedi Evi plays a significant role in buttressing the region’s tourism sector. A reported 20,000 people visit the centre each year.
But the Van cats became endangered through interbreeding.
‘‘We monitor the breeding, look to eliminate impurities, by selectively matching cats,’’ says Kaya. ‘‘If a litter is born with impurities, we remove its parents from the breeding pool.’’
The cats’ bloodlines are stored in a database,