The habit of calling every cat with long hair an "Ankara" lingered for quite a while until it became clear that the pedigree of the purebred is in Turkey. It is a natural purebred cat regarded as one of the national heritages of Turkey.

The Ankara cat made its first foray into the West during the Crusades. Centuries later, in the 1620s, a French scientist by the name Fabri de Peiresc took a few purebred white Ankara cats to his country and presented one of the first kittens as a gift to Cardinal de Richelieu. Marie Antoniette was an admirer of this noble cat. The Ankara cat has taken its distinguished place in a number of oil paintings by European masters of this period!