On the third Thursday of every month, at exactly 7:13 PM, the grey-and-white cat named Evliya would become transparent. Not entirely invisible—more like a living piece of frosted glass moving through the labyrinthine streets of Galata. The locals, long accustomed to the strange occurrences that plagued their quarter of Istanbul, simply adjusted their glasses or blamed the rakı they had with lunch.
I first noticed this phenomenon while drinking bad coffee at a worse café near the Galata Tower. The tower itself had recently developed a habit of humming Beatles songs at midnight, but that’s another story entirely.
Evliya wasn’t like other cats, though in Istanbul, no cat is really like other cats. During the day, she performed the usual cat duties: accepting sardines from fishmongers, sleeping on centuries-old stone steps, and occasionally staring into middle distance as if receiving transmissions from another dimension. Perhaps she was.
The real mystery began when she visited the Galata Mevlevihanesi, where the Whirling Dervishes practiced their ancient ceremony. There was one dervish in particular—Ahmet Efendi, a man who claimed to be sixty-seven years old but whose birth certificate had mysteriously vanished in a fire that smelled of cinnamon and burning photographs.
Every Thursday evening, as the sun bled orange into the Bosphorus, Evliya would materialize, or rather, become less transparent, inside the tekke, the Dervish’ lodge. According to Ahmet, who told me this story over a glass of tea so strong it might have been liquid time, the cat had been coming there since before he was born. When I pointed out this was impossible given the cat’s apparent age, he just smiled the way people smile when they know something about bending reality that you don’t.
“Have you ever wondered,” he asked me once, “why cats always land on their feet? It’s because they’re constantly spinning, all of them, all the time. We just can’t see it. They’re whirling at a frequency beyond human comprehension.”
The truth about Evliya emerged gradually, like a Polaroid developing in reverse. During the sema ceremony, while the dervishes turned in their white robes like human planets, Evliya would begin to spin too. But she spun in a way that seemed to tear small holes in the fabric of reality. Through these holes, observers with open eyes could see other Istanbuls: one where the conquest never happened, another where the city was built entirely of water and light, and yet another where cats were the size of houses and humans lived in elaborate scratching posts.
Some said Evliya was actually a dervish who had achieved such perfect spinning that she had transformed into a cat sometime in the 15th century. Others insisted she was much older—a spirit that had wandered into our dimension through one of the mysterious wells that dot the city’s underground cisterns.
Ahmet Efendi knew the truth, but he shared it with me only after I had watched thirteen consecutive ceremonies and eaten exactly seven pieces of lokum from a shop that appeared only on rainy Tuesdays. Evliya, he explained, was not a cat at all, but rather a sort of cosmic punctuation mark—a living, breathing comma in the run-on sentence of existence. Her transparency was simply the universe’s way of copy-editing reality.
I stopped asking questions after that. Some mysteries, I realized, are better left spinning, like dervishes in an endless dance, like cats falling through dimensions, like the persistent feeling that somewhere, in another Istanbul, another version of me is writing a completely different story about a completely ordinary cat.
The Galata Tower still hums Beatles songs at midnight, though now it seems to prefer late-period John Lennon. And if you ever find yourself in that part of Istanbul on a Thursday evening, and if you happen to see a semi-transparent cat spinning in perfect harmony with the dervishes, try not to think too hard about it. Some truths are better understood through peripheral vision, in the spaces between what we think we know and what we know we don’t.