Qualla: Sivriada

Sivriada: Introduction

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RThiele, CC BY 3.0. Two names cling to this tiny island, and both are earned. Sivriada — "sharp island" in Turkish — describes what you see from the water: a steep, rocky spine rising from the Sea of Marmara, barely a tenth of a square kilometer, treeless and spare. The second name, Hayırsızada, means "the inauspicious island," or more bluntly, "the island of the good-for-nothing." That name arrived in 1911, after an episode that shocked Istanbul at the time and has not been forgotten since. On this small, unforgiving piece of land, the authorities of the late Ottoman city chose to abandon approximately 80,000 stray dogs to die.

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Image: RThiele | CC BY 3.0

Sivriada: A Byzantine Island of Exiles

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Homonihilis, Public domain. Long before the dogs, Sivriada served the Byzantine Empire as a place to put people who had become inconvenient. The emperors found island exile useful — distant enough to remove a troublemaker from court politics, confined enough to prevent escape. The first recorded exile here ...

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Image: Homonihilis | Public domain

Sivriada: The Dogs of Istanbul

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julian Nyča, CC BY-SA 4.0. Istanbul's relationship with stray dogs is ancient and complicated. For centuries, the city's dogs were woven into street life — fed by residents, recognized as neighborhood fixtures, tolerated in ways that puzzled Western visitors. By the late Ottoman period, as Istanbul moderni...

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Image: Julian Nyča | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sivriada: Memory and Film

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hamdigumus, CC0. The Hayırsızada Dog Massacre has not passed out of public consciousness. In 2013, filmmaker Andrea Luka Zimmerman made Taskafa, Stories of the Street, a documentary that draws on this history while exploring Istanbul's ongoing relationship with its stray animal population. Animal...

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Image: Hamdigumus | CC0

Sivriada: The Island Today

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oystercard, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sivriada sits in the Sea of Marmara roughly 20 kilometers southeast of central Istanbul, part of the Princes' Islands archipelago and officially a neighborhood of Istanbul's Adalar district. It is the smallest and most remote of the archipelago's inhabited islands — though inhabi...

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Image: Oystercard | CC BY-SA 4.0