Istanbul

Did You Know?

Istanbul Once Reset Its Clocks Every Few Days. Now It Never Resets Them at All.

Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's own estimate puts the number of street cats in the city at around 125,000. Add household cats and the figure is put at roughly 200,000. Alongside them are an estimated 130,000 street dogs.

Nobody knows the real number, and the municipality says so. Counting a free-roaming animal population is genuinely hard; different methods produce wildly different totals, and figures go stale within a couple of years.

But here is the part worth doing the arithmetic on.

The municipality distributes one tonne of dry food per day, across 199 designated feeding points around the city.

One tonne sounds enormous. Divide it by the estimated street animal population — call it 255,000 cats and dogs — and it comes to about four grams each per day. A cat eats something like sixty.

So the city government supplies, at most, a few percent of what Istanbul's street animals actually eat. The other ninety-odd percent comes from individuals: shopkeepers putting out bowls, residents with a bag of kibble by the door, restaurant kitchens, and the small wooden cat houses that appear on pavements without anyone organising it.

The cats have names. Some have monuments. Tombili, photographed lounging propped on one elbow on a Kadıköy pavement, became internationally famous and was commemorated with a bronze statue after his death. Gli lived in the Hagia Sophia and was visited by tourists who had come to see the building.

The clock: which is a useful way to arrive at how this city used to keep time.

Under the Ottoman alaturka system, the day began at sunset. Twelve o'clock was the moment the sun went down — which meant the moment moved every day, and every clock in the city had to be corrected every few days, all year, forever.

That job could not be centralised. It required muvakkithanes — timekeeping rooms attached to mosques — and the muvakkits who staffed them, calculating and adjusting continuously so that the city stayed roughly in agreement with itself.

Istanbul has always run on constant small corrections made by a lot of separate hands. It fed its clocks that way for centuries, and it still feeds its cats that way.

For most of Ottoman history, Istanbul ran on gurubi time — hours counted from sunset. Twelve o'clock was not noon or midnight. Twelve o'clock was the moment the sun went down.

Think about what that means mechanically. Sunset moves. It moves every single day. So a clock set to Ottoman time was wrong within days and had to be adjusted continuously, all year, forever. The system later became known as alaturka saat, to distinguish it from the European alafranga system.

This required professionals. Attached to the major mosques were muvakkithanes — timekeeping rooms — staffed by a muvakkit, a specialist trained in astronomy and mathematics. His job was to calculate the five daily prayer times using astrolabes, quadrants, sundials and water clocks, and later mechanical clocks. The first and most famous, Ali Kuşçu, was appointed to the Fatih Mosque muvakkithane in 1470.

For a long stretch of the nineteenth century, Istanbul simply ran on both systems at once. Ottoman palace clocks were built with two dials — alaturka and alafranga — on the same face, because the empire genuinely needed to know both numbers.

Government offices moved to European time around 1912. Law no. 697, dated 26 December 1925, abolished alaturka time from 1 January 1926. The muvakkithanes themselves were not formally closed until 1952, more than a quarter of a century after the system they served had been made illegal.

The clock: now look at where Istanbul ended up.

In 2016 Türkiye abolished daylight saving time and fixed the country permanently at UTC+3. The clocks are never adjusted. Not seasonally, not ever.

Istanbul sits at 29° east. UTC+3 is built for the 45th meridian. Which means Istanbul now runs about 64 minutes ahead of its own sun — permanently, by design. In late December, sunrise does not arrive until around 8:30 in the morning. Fifteen million people begin their winter days in the dark, on purpose.

So this is a city that once employed mosque astronomers to keep its clocks in continuous conversation with the actual sky, and now runs on a fixed number that the sky is not consulted about at all.

Both decisions were deliberate. Both were about being modern. They are exact opposites.

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