Odd-coloured eyes
The centre's prized line is the cat with one blue and one amber eye, and here you see many of them instead of a single postcard.
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A snow-white cat with one blue eye and one amber eye that swims in Lake Van rather than fleeing the water: that is the Van cat, the city's emblem, greeting you as a giant statue at the town entrance. This house is the one place you will see it in numbers and in its purest form. Van Yüzüncü Yıl University set the centre up in the 1990s after cross-breeding had all but wiped the type out of local homes; by the centre's own 2024 report it keeps around 170 cats, and roughly eighty kittens are born here each year, about half of them adopted out to families for a fee once weaned. This is not a zoo but a veterinary-faculty research centre that lets the public in. You enter a large hall built around one big central enclosure that you can walk all the way round, watching the cats play, sunbathe and climb; across the corridor are small side rooms with glass windows for pregnant mothers and kittens, linked to the central run by transparent tunnels under the corridor floor, so cats pad past beneath your feet, and outside there are fenced garden runs the cats use in good weather. If you want more than that, buy a pouch of wet food from the staff (about 50 lira in 2024) and they let you into the central enclosure to feed and hold the cats under supervision; otherwise petting through the mesh is open to everyone. It is a visit for children first: thirty minutes to an hour is plenty, and the ground-level building is easy with a pushchair. The rooms are plain and institutional, and most photos end up taken through glass or wire, so do not expect a tourist attraction dressed up for visitors. Late spring, when the kitten room is full, is the best moment; in summer heat the cats are sluggish, so come in the morning. The house opens every day of the week, public holidays included, with a lunch break from noon to one, and the token entry fee is paid at the door. It sits on the university's Zeve campus on the northern road out of Van towards Erciş, about ten kilometres from the centre: fifteen to twenty minutes by taxi or car, with free parking on campus, or on the university buses from the city centre. It slots naturally into half a day with the lakeshore and Van's famous breakfast houses rather than being an outing in its own right.
The centre's prized line is the cat with one blue and one amber eye, and here you see many of them instead of a single postcard.
Buy a pouch of wet food from the staff and they let you into the central enclosure to feed and hold the cats, which is what the children came for.
From April to June the kitten room fills with the spring litters behind glass, the best time to come.
Zeve Campus, Van Yüzüncü Yıl University, Bardakçı Mahallesi, Tuşba, Van
Honestly, not as a trip in itself; it is a plain research centre you see in half an hour. With children it is one of Van's most enjoyable stops; without them, make it a quick detour on the way to the lakeshore or Erciş.
The centre does adopt out surplus kittens for a fee in batches it announces on its website, and adoptions outside the province are limited and controlled; taking a cat abroad also needs a pet passport, vaccinations and a vet certificate plus your own country's rules. Do not count on it during a short holiday.