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Turkish Van In the Beginning
The Turkish Van--a wide-bodied, heavy-boned, mostly white, semilonghaired cat with a distinctive color pattern--is the namesake of the Lake Van district at the other end of Turkey (the end closest to Iran). In its purest manifestation, the Turkish van pattern consists of a spot or two of color on the cat's head and a fully colored tail. The rest of the cat is as white as the Lake Van district during its long, snowy winters. (Lake Van is a large salt lake about a mile above sea level and 75 miles southwest of Mount Ararat, elevation 16,946 feet, where Noah is reputed to have dropped anchor.)
Turkish vans have existed near Lake Van for only Allah knows how long, but if you went to this isolated region looking for a van cat, you would be shown an odd-eyed, white--most likely a longhair similar to the cat we know as the Turkish Angora. The reason that the Van is an ambassador without portfolio in its own land has much to do with a proclamation made by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923. Ataturk declared that his successor would be a person bitten on the ankle by an odd-eyed, white cat. This prediction increased the circulation of odd-eyed whites the way those large envelopes announcing "You may already be a million-dollar winner!" have increased the circulation of the Reader's Digest.
Thus, it is not surprising to learn that there has never been a repository of Van cats in Turkey, and no one has ever found anybody near Lake Van who bred for these cats specifically. Nor is there any reason to believe that Turkish vans have been kept for generations in an environment where [they] could not mix with other breeds--a suggestion offered by at least one observer.
The evolution of the Turkish van as a breed unto itself began in 1955 when Laura Lushington and Sonia Halliday, two British vacationers traveling in Turkey, brought a pair of van kittens back to England and started a breeding program that eventually led to championship recognition there in 1969.
The first pair of Turkish Vans arrived in the United States the following year. Since then Turkish vans have been accepted for championship competition in The International Cat Associatrion, the Association of American Cat Enthusiasts, the American Cat Fanciers Association, the Cat Fancier's Association, and the United Feline Organization. It has achieved experimental status in the Cat Fancier's Federation.
It Looks Like
The Turkish van should not to be confused with the Turkish angora. The Angora is a lithe, fine-boned, most-often-found-in- white, semilonghaired cat that originated centuries ago in Turkey and was named for its prominence about the capital of Ankara, which was formerly called Angora.
The van is substantially boned while the Angora is delicate, and heavily muscled while the Angora is lean. With a head somewhat shorter and wider than the Angora's, the Turkish van is a considerable cat. Show-quality males must weigh at least 10 pounds and measure 28 inches long. Show-quality females must weigh at least 8 pounds and measure 25 inches long.
The van's beguiling pattern is the handiwork of the piebald spotting gene, a dominant gene with variable expression, which accounts for the presence of white in bicolored and tricolored cats. If you imagine that color distribution occupies a spectrum ranging from 1 (a solid-colored cat) to 10 (an all-white model), the ideal Van is a perfect 9. Yet there is some disagreement about what constitutes perfection. If one or both of the spots of color on a Van's head strays upward unto its ear(s), is the cat a 9 or an 8?
"If you want to get excessively picky about it," says one van breeder, "a 9 cannot have color on its ears."
And what if its ears are all white, but a cat has a spot of color on its body? Is it still a 9?
"As far as I'm concerned, it is," that breeder says. "But different people have different opinions on patterns."
Most vans being shown have at least one body spot. Yet whether these cats should be called 8s or 9s seems to make no difference to The International Cat Association (TICA). The TICA standard simply mandates that a van should be disqualified if it has color over "more than 25 percent" of its body. (Such cats are properly called bicolors, not Vans.) The TICA standard also decrees that vans with more than four body spots should be penalized.
The van pattern, spelled with a lowercase v, is also found in other breeds--at least nine others or more, depending on which registry's coloring book you subscribe to. Persians, Cornish rex, Scottish folds, and American shorthairs are among those breeds.
Personality
Besides its color pattern, the characteristic most often associated with the Turkish van is its affinity for water. "They do not all swim," says a van breeder, "but they seem to have a general fascination with water. My cats love to sit in sinks and to stick their feet in water before they drink." (If Ataturk had observed this behavior, he might have declared that his successor would be a person bitten on the ankle by a mostly white cat swimming in Lake Van.) In addition to its fondness for water, the van is also fond of people, and is possessed of keen intelligence and a lively personality.