A stone's throw from Istanbul's glitzy financial district is a shabby street where the sharp whiff of fresh manure competes with city exhaust fumes.
Bright plastic awnings sprayed with numbers and the names of distant Turkish towns stretch for several hundred metres (yards) along the road. Peek inside and you meet the curious gaze of a row of prime bullocks or a bunch of jostling rams.
The farmyard has come to the heart of Turkey's biggest city, as it does every year before the festival of Kurban Bayrami (Eid al-Adha in Arabic), when Muslims traditionally sacrifice a live animal and donate meat to the poor.
The Turkish authorities have long waged a campaign to keep the Bayram slaughter off the streets, setting up designated places to carry out the sacrifice and discouraging unskilled people from killing the sheep, goats or cattle themselves.
But old habits die hard, and many a Turkish street will run red with blood on Sunday, the first day of the four-day holiday.
Istanbul vets armed with tranquilliser guns have set up a telephone hotline to help round up any rampaging animals that break loose in an attempt to escape the knife.
Farmers start bringing their livestock to the big urban centres up to a month ahead of the festival, hoping for healthy sales and good prices. Many come from the poor east of Turkey, trucking the animals hundreds of kilometres (miles) to cities like Istanbul and the inland capital Ankara.
"There are no factories out there, no jobs, nothing. The only thing we can do is farming," said Mehmet Yardimciel, huddling against the damp cold of a grey Istanbul day.
Many pitch camp on open ground on the outskirts of Istanbul, rigging up long, low tents of rough wood and plastic sheeting. Others, like Yardimciel, set up inside the city.
The ruddy-cheeked 28-year-old said he and his brother Metin had trucked their 17 cattle all the way from Kars near Turkey's border with Armenia - a two-day, 1,435-km (900-mile) drive punctuated by stops to check the animals' well-being.
Others have had a shorter journey. Cemal Ulker, originally from the eastern town of Agri, lives in Istanbul and bought his 50 rams from a farmer about 400 km (250 miles) from the city.
Unable to find a job, he's been trading Bayram animals for 15 years. He hopes to earn upwards of 400 million lira ($300) per ram, a good margin on the 330 million he paid for them.
The Yardimciels hope their own three-year-old bullocks will sell for at least one billion lira each, with the best fetching more than twice that. Nine have already found buyers but remain in their roadside pen, awaiting collection.
Not that this represents clear profit.
The trade is tightly regulated. Each animal must be tagged, vaccinated and issued with a "passport" certifying its origin and health. All this costs money, as do transport and feed.
The farmers also have to pay tax, buy materials for the pens and rent pavement space from the local city council.
Mehmet Yardimciel said prices were not much higher in Istanbul than at home in the mountainous east, but it was worth the journey because city buyers offered ready cash.
"There are plenty of customers in Kars but they can't pay immediately," he said. "Sometimes it causes problems. You ask people to pay up, and they say they don't have any money."
Short of cash and anxious to guard their precious livestock, the farmers camp out with their animals in gruelling conditions.
"We can't pay for a hotel, and anyway we couldn't go there because our clothes smell," said Metin Yardimciel, glancing down at his farm-soiled jumper and trousers.
Fearful of thieves or runaway animals, the two brothers and a few other colleagues take turns to patrol up and down the roadside on 24-hour shifts, napping when they can on sacks of cattle feed beside the warm, animal fug of the pens.
To make matters worse, Istanbul suffered its worst snowstorm in 30 years last week, with temperatures well below freezing.
"We were afraid the animals would freeze," Mehmet Yardimciel said. "We just covered the pens really well and waited."
All are longing to get back home after Bayram.
"I'll go back to a nice, clean bed, clean water and clean air," Mehmet said. "And a good square meal".
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