Sheep sacrificed at Eid al-Adha

The Sheep sacrificed at Eid al-Adha are at once the focus of a family observance, figures in the religious story told to a child, and animals seen throughout Istanbul on a holiday morning. In Kemal’s recollection, Füsun’s response gives the ritual a second meaning: alongside its account of obedience and faith, it raises the possibility of mercy toward the living creatures being sacrificed.

The family’s sacrificial sheep

When Füsun was twelve, Kemal brought her near a gathering around a linden tree beside an empty lot. The scene involved the family’s own lamb, which had been kept on a rope in the garden for a week before the holiday. Bekri Efendi and Saim Efendi helped hold the animal, while Kazım, a butcher whose shop was near the police station, carried out the sacrifice. The people around them included children, Çetin Efendi, the family’s chauffeur, and an old man praying.

Kemal later recognized the lamb as theirs. That recognition makes the event more than an encounter with an unfamiliar public custom: an animal once kept in the household’s garden had become the subject of the family’s observance. Füsun silently held Kemal’s jacket sleeve as the sacrifice took place. Her gesture, and her later reference to the lamb as pitiable, make her distress central to the remembered scene without suggesting that she rejected the religious practice itself.

The story of Abraham and the lamb

Afterward, Kemal asked whether Füsun knew why the lamb was sacrificed. She explained that the animal would help people cross the Sırat bridge on their way to heaven. Kemal then told her the story of Abraham, who had prayed for a child, cherished his son Ismail, and was commanded by God in a dream to sacrifice him. As Abraham prepared to obey, a lamb appeared in his son’s place.

The tale places the animal within a sacred account of faith, parental love, and obedience. Yet Füsun’s response to the actual lamb does not remain at the level of the story’s lesson. Her concern is first for the creature before her, rather than for the symbolic meaning assigned to it. The episode holds these two perspectives together: the lamb is a substitute in a religious narrative, but also a particular animal that has been part of the family’s surroundings and whose sacrifice troubles a child watching it.

A city marked by sacrifice

On the same holiday, Kemal, Füsun, and Çetin drove around Istanbul after buying two bottles of government-monopoly liqueur. Kemal remembered the city as a place where slaughter was visible across social settings, from poor neighborhoods and narrow backstreets to major avenues and wealthy districts. They crossed the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn and continued toward Fatih, where they saw more hennaed lambs for sale.

Füsun asked whether those animals would be sacrificed too. Çetin answered that some might remain unsold until the end of the holiday, but that they would eventually be sold to butchers. The uncertainty mattered: there was a possible interval in which the sheep might be spared, but no assurance that they would be. Füsun proposed that she and Kemal buy the animals before the butchers could, and described the rescue as a way to save them from a man who wanted to sacrifice his children. Kemal agreed. The account records their intention, not a purchase or rescue; the sheep’s fate remains unresolved in the episode.

Compassion and sacrifice

Çetin responded to Füsun by explaining the religious idea of submission to God’s command. He also recalled the film The Prophet Abraham, in which Ekrem Güçlü played Abraham. Çetin said his family had wept as Abraham prepared to sacrifice Ismail, when Ismail accepted his father’s obedience to God, and again when the lamb appeared in the son’s place. For him, the tears expressed the willingness to give what one treasures most to a beloved being without expecting anything in return.

That explanation sets a theological interpretation beside Füsun’s practical impulse to intervene. The same animal can signify faith and selfless offering in Çetin’s account, while Füsun sees an opportunity to prevent suffering. The contrast is not resolved into a judgment against the ritual: the narrative presents both the force of its religious meaning and the child’s humane wish to save the sheep. In Kemal’s memory, the lambs consequently mark the holiday not only as a sacred observance but as a citywide encounter that unsettles, and deepens, the meaning of sacrifice.