Dog Who Leads People to Pray in Black Sea Town

AMASRA (Türkiye): In South Asia, getting reluctant people to the mosque is usually a job for elders. Sometimes a persistent grandfather summons younger family members for prayers. Sometimes members of the Tablighi Jamaat go from door to door, persuading people to join them at the mosque.

In this tiny Black Sea town in northern Türkiye, the job has apparently been taken over by a dog.

His name is Kırpık, and while he does not preach or knock on doors, he has discovered another way of making people come looking for him near the mosque: he steals their shoes.

Kırpık roams the narrow lanes of the small town of Amasra. Residents here, much like Kashmiris, remove their shoes before entering their homes. Slippers and sandals are therefore often left temptingly outside doorways.

Kırpık picks up a slipper, sandal or shoe in his mouth and trots away with it, bringing his prize towards the area around Fatih Mosque inside the historic Amasra castle.

Residents initially wondered where their footwear was disappearing. Eventually, the culprit was identified.

"Kırpık is our neighbourhood dog. He has a shoe obsession," resident Kemal Doğu told visiting tourists.

According to Doğu, the dog would spot shoes outside houses, carry them to the mosque courtyard and play with them briefly. When owners come looking for their shoes, they then go inside the mosque and offer prayers.

Initially, Doğu recalls, residents were bewildered to see shoes piling up at the mosque entrance.

A local man cleaning the area eventually discovered the dog bringing them. Instead of throwing the shoes away, he began fastening them to a tree so their owners could find them. Thus was born one of Amasra's more improbable attractions: a lost-shoe tree.

"Whoever sees their shoe on the tree takes it home," Doğu explained.

Another resident, Mustafa Şenyerli, described the arrangement simply: Kırpık brings the shoes, a neighbour hangs them up, their owners reclaim them, and those nobody collects remain on the tree. The result looks like an eccentric piece of contemporary art.

Amasra's Kaleiçi locality inside the Castle is not merely an archaeological enclosure. It is a living fortress. Families still inhabit houses squeezed between ancient walls, somewhat reminiscent for a South Asian traveller of Rajasthan's Jaisalmer Fort, where history is not fenced off from daily life.

Residents say that the dog has found his own method of bringing people towards the mosque. Owners searching for missing footwear eventually make their way towards Fatih Mosque, and many enter the mosque to pray. Some bring food for the dog. The animal has become sufficiently accepted by the neighbourhood and mosque management that a small shelter has been arranged for him nearby.

It is difficult to think of a more benign thief.

Through Mountain, Another World

Amasra lies roughly 300 kilometres north of Ankara, but distance alone does not describe the journey.

It takes around four hours by road, across the plains and mountains of northern Anatolia. For much of the drive, there is little indication of the spectacle waiting on the other side of the Küre Mountains.

Then the vehicle enters a tunnel, and what happens on emerging from it will be instantly familiar to anybody from Kashmir.

For decades, travellers driving from Jammu towards Srinagar experienced something similar at the Jawahar Tunnel. One entered through a comparatively austere mountain landscape and emerged into another climatic world. The light changed, the air changed, and the vegetation changed as the Kashmir Valley suddenly opened ahead.

The transition at the Küre Mountains evokes much the same sensation. On the other side are densely forested slopes cascading towards the Black Sea, and after hours on the road, the first sight of blue water framed by intense green has an almost medicinal effect. The tiredness accumulated during the journey seems suddenly to recede.

Below lies Amasra.

The settlement is remarkably compact. The permanent population of the town is only around 20,000, although summer brings an enormous influx. In 2025, nearly three million visitors reportedly came to Amasra.

Yet away from the busiest summer weekends, Amasra retains the rhythm of a small town, and that is precisely its attraction for many retired Turks.

Our guide and tour operator, Nadide Yilmaz, summed it up in geographical terms.

"It is a small town with everything around," she said.

"You don't need city transport. Behind the town are lush green forests and in front are the clear waters of the Black Sea. Everything is within walking distance, the market and all the basic facilities. That is why retired people prefer to live here."

Talking to pensioners who have made Amasra their home explains why this compactness matters so much.

"Everything I need is within a ten-minute walk," said Ahmet Demir, a retired bank employee.

"I leave my flat, walk down to the harbor, greet the baker, pick up greens from the women's market, Galla Pazarı, and sit at a çay bahçesi. You don't need a car, and you are never an anonymous face in a crowd."

Retirement here is not simply about scenery or cheaper, quieter living. It is also about recovering the neighbourhood relationships that can disappear in a metropolis.

"In Istanbul, you can live in the same apartment block for fifteen years and not know your neighbour's name," said Emre Sahin, a former engineer who relocated to Amasra.

"Here, within three months, the fishmonger knew how I liked my hamsi cleaned, and the grocer asked after my health if I didn't pass by for two days. That sense of neighbourhood, mahalle, was what I had missed all my adult life."

For somebody coming from Ankara, Istanbul, Delhi, Mumbai, Karachi or Dhaka, the absence of a daily battle with distance is striking. Groceries, cafés, the waterfront, healthcare facilities and markets are accessible largely on foot, while the harbour cafés, tea gardens and weekly market also preserve the social encounters on which small communities depend.

Castle Where People Still Live

Amasra has accumulated civilizations almost casually.

Its position on the Black Sea made it valuable to successive powers. Ancient settlements, Roman and Byzantine rule, Genoese commercial influence, and the Ottoman conquest have all left traces.

The most fascinating example of Amasra's layered identity is Fatih Mosque, beside Kırpık's famous shoe territory.

It began not as a mosque but as a Byzantine church built in the ninth century. When Sultan Mehmed II, known as Fatih or "the Conqueror," took Amasra in 1460, the church was converted into a mosque. It remains a functioning place of worship. The mosque still preserves another unusual Ottoman tradition: during Friday and Eid prayers, the sermon is delivered while holding a sword.

To understand Amasra properly, however, one has to leave the land.

Small excursion boats take visitors out from the harbour for trips of roughly an hour along the coast. From the water, the geography becomes clearer.

The town seems almost wedged between forest and sea. Green hills rise abruptly behind houses. The fortress occupies the rocky promontory. Coves cut into the coastline, while the houses, harbour and castle seem compressed into the narrow space nature has allowed them.

The water around Amasra can be astonishingly transparent. Near the coast, one can look down into shades of blue and green and, in places, see beneath the surface.

For a visitor from South Asia, where many urban beaches, lakes and waterways struggle under plastic waste, sewage and uncontrolled construction, the immediate question is unavoidable: how does a town receiving so many tourists keep its waterfront looking like this?

The answer is not that Amasra has somehow escaped environmental problems. Coastal and seabed cleaning campaigns are conducted, while wastewater treatment and deep-sea discharge infrastructure also play a role.

There is another, unsettling thought while the boat moves across this tranquil sea.

Look north from Amasra, and there is no visible land, only water stretching towards the horizon. But continue across the Black Sea and eventually one reaches Crimea. In straight-line terms, the Crimean coast around Sevastopol and Yalta lies roughly 330 to 340 kilometres away.

Across the same sea lies one of the central theatres of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Sevastopol is the historic base of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, while Crimea, annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014 in a move rejected by most of the international community, remains central to the war.

Town Built for Walking

Back on land, Amasra encourages a slower rhythm. There is little need for an elaborate itinerary because much of the town reveals itself simply by walking through the castle lanes, crossing old stone passages, descending towards the harbour, climbing to viewpoints and wandering through markets selling wooden handicrafts and souvenirs.

Amasra offers a different bargain, one in which daily life is compressed into manageable distances and familiar faces. When work no longer dictates where one must live, being able to reach the market, waterfront, café and neighbours on foot acquires a value that is difficult to calculate.

Before leaving Amasra, there is one final stop that should not be underestimated: the Amasra Museum.

Its physical size is modest, but its exhibits stretch the visitor's sense of time far beyond the Roman, Byzantine, Genoese and Ottoman civilizations visible elsewhere in the town.

One display is titled "Traces of Life from 497 Million Years Ago to the Present." It begins long before humans appeared, with fossils and representations of sea urchins dating back around 450 million years, sea stars from the Ordovician period, fern impressions from around 419 million years ago, gastropods reaching back to the late Cambrian period, and ammonites from the Jurassic and Cretaceous eras.

The effect is startling. After spending the day thinking of Roman and Byzantine remains as ancient, the museum suddenly places those civilizations at the very end of a story hundreds of millions of years long.

The museum explains that pottery has been found in settlements since the Late Neolithic period, around 7000 BCE, and that changes in shapes, decoration and manufacturing techniques help archaeologists date layers of settlement and identify the cultures that occupied them.

The museum's panels describe the Black Sea as part of the enormous maritime trading network of the ancient world. Roman merchants sailed the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts carrying grain, wine, olive oil, salted fish, and garum, the fermented fish sauce that was an important commodity of the period. Trade brought goods from much farther afield, including spices from South and Southeast Asia.

The museum then moves into the East Roman, or Byzantine, world. Jewellery from roughly 395 to 1453 CE shows how older Hellenistic and Roman traditions survived while gradually incorporating Christian symbols. Constantinople developed into an important jewellery centre, where craftsmen used forging, moulding, filigree and granulation techniques. Bronze and glass were widely used for the jewellery of ordinary people and for personal religious objects.

The museum is therefore not merely a collection of attractive antiquities. In a few rooms it connects geology, domestic life, religion, art, maritime commerce and political power.

That makes it an appropriate place to finish a journey through Amasra, because the museum explains what the streets outside have already been saying.

This little town has never belonged to only one age.

Long before there was an Amasra, prehistoric seas left their creatures in stone. Greeks and Romans followed. Byzantine Christians worshipped here. Genoese merchants connected its harbour to a maritime commercial world. The Ottomans conquered it, converted a church into a mosque, and added another layer to a place already thick with history. Modern Türkiye inherited all of them.

Today, visitors come for the castle, the Black Sea, the fish restaurants, the forests and the views.

Yet perhaps the memory that stays longest is not an emperor's portrait, an ancient amphora or a Genoese wall. It is a black-and-white dog wandering through a living castle, looking for somebody's unattended slipper.

Somewhere outside a house in Kaleiçi, another pair of shoes is probably waiting. Kırpık only needs one of them, and sooner or later its owner may find that the search leads towards the mosque.