The Turkish Van is a semilonghaired breed of domestic cat, which was developed in the United Kingdom from a selection of cats obtained from various cities of modern Turkey, especially Southeast Turkey.[1]:112 The breed is rare,[2] and is distinguished by the Van pattern (named for the breed), where the colour is restricted to the head and the tail, and the rest of the cat is white;[2] this is due to the expression of the piebald white spotting gene, a type of partial leucism.[3]:148 A Turkish Van may have blue or amber eyes, or be oddeyed (having one eye of each colour). The breed has been claimed to be descended from the landrace of usually allwhite Van cats (Turkish: Van kedisi), mostly found near Lake Van,[2] though one of the two original breeders' own writings indicate clearly that none of the breed's foundation cats came from the Van area.[1]:114[4]
Then called the Turkish Cat, the breed was first recognised as such by a breeder/fancier organisation, the UKbased Governing Council of the Cat Fancy (GCCF), in 1969.[1]:113 It was later renamed "Turkish Van" to better distinguish it from the Turkish Angora breed. The term "Turkish Vankedisi" is used by some organisations as a name for allwhite specimens of the formal Turkish Van breed,[5] nomenclature easily confused with the Van kedisi landrace cats, which are also often allwhite.
Breed standards allow for one or more body spots as long as there is no more than 20% colour and the cat does not give the appearance of a bicolour. A few random spots are acceptable, but they should not detract from the pattern. The rest of the cat is white. Although red tabby and white is the classic van colour, the colour on a Van's head and tail can be one of the following: red, cream, black, blue, red tabby, cream tabby, brown tabby, blue tabby, tortoiseshell, dilute tortoiseshell (also known as bluecream), brownpatched tabby, bluepatched tabby and any other colour not showing evidence of crossbreeding with the pointcoloured breeds (Siamese, Himalayan, etc.). Not all registries recognise all of these colour variations.
While a few registries recognise allwhite specimens as Turkish Vans, most do not. The USbased Cat Fanciers' Association (CFA, the world's largest registry of pedigreed cats) and Fédération Internationale Féline (FIFe, the largest international cat fancier organisation) recognise only vanpatterned specimens, as they define the breed by both its type and pattern. The Germanybased but international World Cat Federation (WCF) considers the allwhite specimens a separate breed, which it calls the Turkish Vankedisi,[5] a name that is easily confused with the landrace Van kedisi (Van cat).