Hello everybody! I am Princess Vanessa of the living cat kind, co-author of the Vita Gazette. In this first article, I am telling you about our common history, comradeship and suffering going back thousands of years. Please read it so that the same pain does not happen again and our happiness increases.

Hello! You don’t know me, but our common history with you goes back thousands of years. Our friendship, which began in antiquity, continued undisturbed except in the dark shadows of medieval ignorance. Nature took the pain of cat massacres bitterly. Using its bat, the Black Plague sadly wiped out a third of the population of Europe. Afterwards, our value was rediscovered in the enlightened period that came with the Renaissance. We sat in the corners of the houses. We started to take part in works of art as a symbol of beauty and elegance.

Long ago, when you started to deal with agriculture, our wild ancestors, also called Felis catus in Mesopotamia, started to struggle with insects such as mice and insects that haunt your grain stocks. In other words, our comradeship and friendship with you started with agriculture. You were giving us food that you filled with love. We were also offering you our hunting skill, which is strengthened by your love.

During the ancient Egyptian civilization, we lived the golden age of our togetherness. My great grandfather on a leash, pictured around 2600 BC in a tomb belonging to the V. Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, is an indication that we are now being hosted in palaces. There was even a section of the state that only took care of us, the cats they named Miu. The officers working here were tasked with finding and returning cats that were taken out of the country. Over time, the Egyptians regarded us as sacred creatures. So much so that their passions went as far as worshiping us. They even built a temple for the Cat-headed Goddess Bast, known as the protector of evil spirits and diseases, the goddess of joy and dance. Those who killed the cats were given the death penalty. Even those who killed us by mistake were given the same punishment. Then they began to embalm us as ‘sacred creatures’. Only in the British History Museum. There are 192 mummified cats discovered to have been made between 600 and 200 BC. After we died, they were mourning at home, raising their eyebrows out of respect for us. When their eyebrows grew back, they were ending the period of mourning. Somewhere in Egypt, our mummified ancestors were sometimes found buried with or near their owners. The seals on the mummies’ identity attest to this. On the other hand, they regarded us as a symbol of eternity, that is, as immortal. Egyptian priests propagated this belief because our tails touch our heads while we sleep. The phrase used to emphasize how beautiful a woman is in Egypt is “beautiful as a cat”. Egyptian women, who associated cats with sexuality and fertility, tried to be like us. Later, they added to these abilities protecting the dead, making it rain, healing children, motherhood and love.

The Egyptians even surrendered their cities out of love for us. Knowing the love of the Egyptians for us, the Persian Emperor II. Cambyses used cats in the Battle of Pelusium (525 BC) to conquer Egypt. While the Persian soldiers were attacking from the back of the animals with their shields on which they had painted cats, they held the cats in their arms. The Egyptians, who were afraid of harming us and receiving the death penalty, did not know what to do with the cat pictures they saw on the enemy shields and left Egypt in the hands of the Persians.

We were very respected in Rome as well as in Japanese and Indian cultures. Cats were first seen as pets by the Greeks and Romans in the 5th century BC. The mosaics found in the ruins of Pompeii are proof that we have taken the lead in luxury residences. In ancient Greece, however, we became valuable enough to adorn coins. The tombstone of a little girl holding a cat in the 1st century AD is one of the earliest evidence of the place of cats in Rome. However, they had no intention of taking advantage of us. That’s because the Greeks and Romans used domesticated ferrets as hunters. The respect shown to us stemmed from their admiration for our independent personality. They gave our features to goddesses like Artemis-Diana. In Greece, the playwright Aristophanes (446-386 BC) used cats as a comedy element. “He invented the phrase ‘The cat did it’ to throw the blame”. Among the ancient civilizations, we were at least popular with the Greeks because of the images of the goddess of death, darkness, and witches in some myths. The Greeks’ gratitude for cats developed much later, thanks to the legend that the cat protected the baby Jesus from rodents and snakes. Thanks to this, we got the best corners in Greek houses. But we weren’t very respected beings at first.

The Middle Ages Crushed Us All…

Unfortunately, the Middle Ages had a very bad effect on our lives like yours. In 1232, Pope Gregory IX issued a proclamation that cats are demonic beings. After that date, both cats and cat owners began to be brutally killed in Europe. The belief that the black cat is unlucky is a belief from those days. We were no longer holy, but demons appointed to witches by the devil. Our guilt was great; we had the unpardonable crime of being accomplices of witches. That’s why we shared their fate. We were either thrown into the fire alive or thrown into the water by being stuffed in a sack. There were also those who were skinned alive and subjected to all kinds of torture.

In the Elizabethan era, cats were thrown into fire in village squares as a symbol of heresy, and those who thought of keeping cats were intimidated. It is a legacy of bitter days that the headgear, which I had to wear with disgust after the operation, was called “Elizabeth Collar”. Just being nice to a cat at that time was tantamount to blasphemy, and the punishment was death for death. So he had to pick up a stone from the spot and throw it at him when he saw a cat. Otherwise, he could find himself before the Inquisition, on suspicion of being a corrupt Christian. Many innocent women and cats were killed, burned and buried alive by black ignorance during this period. Until the middle of the 17th century, cat burning ceremonies were performed in the cities of Metz and Paris on the Feast of Saint Jeane. There were also those who made a fortune from our leather commercially. Only two centuries ago, cat skin was used in the manufacture of luxury gloves in England and France.

The revenge of thousands of cats killed in this dark period was heavy. As the number of cats on the streets and in the houses decreased, the number of mice increased. This fueled the black plague epidemic that led to human slaughter. Nature avenged the murdered innocents. A third of Europe’s population perished in this terrible epidemic.

The fate of cats also changed when the dark period came to an end and the Renaissance period, which illuminated Europe, came. We are starting to go back to our good old days. We were now portrayed as symbols of beauty and elegance. The painters gave us the value we deserve and used us as models. In fact, we did not like being a goddess in Egypt, nor a bridesmaid to the Emperor of Japan. We loved sharing the same space freely in our relationship based on mutual respect and love.

Goodbye for now, hoping to get through these days together as enter another dark age…

                                                                                                                         Princess Vanessa