This short description of the street cats of Istanbul pullulates with lively triologisms.  If you enjoy these chaps, then see My Kinda Cats II and My Kinda Cats III, and meet the noble creatures who enrich the gene pool of island cats.

‘They are to be seen at their most disreputable in Constantinople, where the city pullulates with them. After dark these noble but sordid streets seem to move and writhe in the lamplight, an illusion induced by the criss-crossing itineraries of thousands of cats, sometimes alone, sometimes in little troops, all of them setting out on thousands of dark and questionable errands. Many of them have the air of broken-down musketeers with fractured noses, tattered ears and the equivalent of eye patches, their moth-eaten tails carried swaggeringly like long rapiers in worn-out scabbards.’

See also our themed section dedicated to cat quotes.

Source: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, introduction by Michael Gorra, New York: New York Review of Books, 2006 (1958), p. 300