Today, dogs have become part of the modern home. More than “guardians,” they often take on the role of a child inside the house, almost like a member of the family. Some of them even have jobs. Of course the first thing that comes to mind is assistance dogs, but once I saw a dog working in drug dealing. A sweet, small character.
What is interesting is that even though I spent part of my childhood in Antep and part in Istanbul, these cities, even if they count as “big cities” in Turkey, still felt like transitional forms. They were still somewhere between town and city, between nature and the modern metropolis, on a threshold. In my childhood, dogs were political beings in the most direct sense: they fought for territory and tried to defend their right to it. They were not fully domesticated.
Sometimes we would take a dog when it was a puppy, raise it, and bring it into our child groups. But even then, the relationship depended on how we approached them. It was less about domesticating them and more about our own wild impulses moving toward them. We learned from them while protecting our areas. We behaved like them, tried to pull them to our side, and entered fights against other neighbourhood groups. The partnership was not really that we made them tame; it was that we stayed together for a shared interest in the struggle over territory.
It is hard to know these things immediately. Back then I did not think much about it. But one day, after becoming “tame” myself, turned into a middle-class existence, I got dressed properly and took the trash out. I threw it away. Then, walking back toward the car, I realised I had also accidentally thrown away a bag of hot peppers. They were handmade Urfa-style peppers I had brought all the way from Gaziantep. I had an older friend at the university who loved spicy food and I had brought them for him. Annoyed with myself, I went back.
The moment I reached into the trash to take the bag back, three street-smart dogs in the neighbourhood, dogs I used to feed all the time and who usually wagged their tails when they saw me, suddenly started barking at me. In that instant my mind formed new synapses, as if it was connecting an entire history of relations on the spot. As long as I threw things away and gave them food, we were “friends.” But the moment I tried to take something back, we had to enter a different relation.
They do the same thing to kids who collect scrap. In Gaziantep, people used to say, especially in the industrial area, that dogs attacked Syrian kids because they were Syrian. But I had been a collector myself when I was a child, and I know that entering a different area and collecting something from it, whether the other side is dogs or another neighbourhood’s kids, makes no difference: for them it is a territorial violation. Syrian kids would take plastic and paper from there, we would steal electric cables. None of that is useful to a dog, and yet the basic drive is the same: to protect territory. We were always in conflict with children and dogs in that way.
This is not a class issue. Class is the issue of city people. This is a territory issue. And in fact it belongs to another world.
Every time I go back to Gaziantep, I take walks with the dogs in the industrial area. This is not the domestic routine of letting them poop and bringing them back home. In that sociality, it is a matter of making our presence felt: the industrial zone recognising that I am there, and the dogs recognising that they are there, and that we are there in the same field.
And once, after a long time away, I realised something else. One of my father’s dogs had changed and I had not noticed. But the dog came to me as if we knew each other, as if we had recognised each other, as if we had loved each other, as if we had fought together and walked together in so many places. Then I understood: it was not our Alex.
What is recognition really? I thought the dog remembered me, she was running towards me joyful, so certain. For a moment it was like sharing something real. But then I realised it was not the same dog. She could not have remembered me. Yet she did. Maybe recognition had not always something to do with memory. Maybe something in my scent, in my voice or something about my presense told her that I belong. Not as a past experience, but something felt. Maybe that is how recognition works. Maybe we do not actually remember people places moments we only feel the resonance of something familiar. Something with unmeasurable unseen patterns. Maybe that is enough. I was happy dog was happy. Does it matter if the reason was wrong? Maybe all life is like this mistakes still feel real. Maybe all recognition is a new form of invention, maybe in the end it doesn’t ot even matter.