 NetPetsŪ Main Page |
contact information |  The Cat Center |
Turkish Angora In the Beginning
The Turkish Angora is a scarce and somewhat misunderstood breed that originated centuries ago in Turkey. Because these native Turkish cats were plentiful in and about the capital city of Ankara, which went by the name Angora until 1930, the breed came to be known as the Angora cat. (The forename "Turkish" is a modern addition.)
Among pedigreed Turkish Angoras the predominant color is white. This is no accident. Indeed, some people will tell you that the pure-as-the-driven-snow Angora comes only in white. And a few people insist that the pure Angora comes only in odd-eyed white. If this last is true, very few Turkish Angoras registered in the last three decades have been worthy of the name. (Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Turkish counterparts of our free-roaming domestic cats wear coats of many colors and two different lengths to boot.)
The you-can-have-any-color-you-want-as-long-as-it's-white decree is difficult to trace to its roots. One suspects, nonetheless, that the author of this edict spoke with an earthly, not a heavenly, voice. The laws of genetics being what they are, it is difficult to imagine all the cats in an area being white-- unless that area was fenced in and the breeding activities of the cats in the area (cats that were chosen because they were white in the first place) were controlled by a curator and any non- white cats produced by the chosen hued were given away without ceremony, documentation, or the chance to reproduce their unwanted kind.
This is what has transpired at the Ankara Zoo in Turkey for the last 55 years or more. (And--to a lesser extent and for a lesser period of time--at the Istanbul Zoo as well.) Since the Ankara Zoo has been the primary source of the Turkish Angoras imported by American breeders (the Cat Fancier's Association will not register any Turkish imports that weren't born in this zoo) and since CFA looked down its registry at non-white Angoras until 1978, some time after the other associations had recognized them, it is no small wonder that this small (in numbers) breed has been about as variegated so far as a herd of polar bears cavorting in a blizzard.
Some Turkish Angora owner/writers have claimed that their favorite breed first arrived in the United States with the early settlers, but this has never been documented. Angora fanciers are also wont to speculate that the Turkish Angora "can probably trace its ancestry back to Noah's Ark," which is thought to have dropped anchor in Turkey.
The first Turkish Angoras to reach this country in recent memory were brought here in 1962 by Liesa F. Grant, whose husband was an army colonel stationed in Turkey. Subsequent importations by Grant and other Americans stationed in or traveling through Turkey comprised the foundation stock of the Angora breed in the United States. Today the Turkish Angora is accepted for championship competition by all the major North American cat associations.
It Looks Like ...
The Dictionary of Misinformation (Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1974) cheerfully informs us that banana oil is not made from bananas; SOS is not an abbreviation for "Save Our Ship" (or "Save Our Souls" either); and Spanish moss really isn't moss at all. What this balloon-bursting opus doesn't reveal is that "Angora" is not a synonym for "Persian." This despite the fact that many people use Angora in this misinformed sense, most often in a construction like the following: "We used to have an Angora cat when I was a little." Scratch this construction and chances are you will find that what the speaker actually had was a "fluffy, part-Persian" instead.
Even to the uninitiated the Turkish Angora could scarcely look more unlike the Persian. The latter, bless its chock-a-block little heart, conforms to a standard heavy with the terms "broad," "massive," "thick," "powerful," "cobby," and "well- developed," while the Turkish Angora pays homage to a bevy of antonyms that includes "slim," "graceful," "long," "lithe," "gentle," and "wedge-shaped." What's more, the hair-down-to-there Persian (thanks to a thick undercoat) is apt to mat if you look at it crossly. The Turkish Angora has a medium-long coat--and no undercoat--and doesn't require a.m.-p.m.-and-in-between grooming. Finally, Persian registrations have been rather normally distributed across the color spectrum; but the Turkish Angora's have been skewed to the white. Roughly three quarters of the Angoras on record are on record as being white.
Personality
Turkish Angoras are playful without being pesty, sociable without being stuck to their owners all the time. Angoras display a natural curiosity about their surroundings. Highly intelligent, they are, nonetheless, not as vocal as some other breeds touted for their intellects. Like their Turkish Van cousins, Angoras also have a reputation for being fond of water.