This is about how we came to breeding the Orientals, and our cattery name.
It's quite a long story, so bear with me :-)

Years ago, I (Shirley) had a cat named Amber. She was a discarded black tabby/white, old but o so sweet. After a few years I discovered that she suffered from cancer, and her health began to fail. Meanwhile, a friend of mine had a litter and one of the female kittens was still looking for a home. It was a cute black tabby/white. But she didn't like me at all!
Then the day came that I had to put Amber to sleep and had her cremated. Of course I needed a shoulder to cry on, so I went over to my friend's house. To my surprise, the kitten crawled under my sweater and stayed there sleeping for more than 3 hours. She liked me!
That's when it came to me; she was, in a weird way, a reincarnation of Amber. And she was mine! Of course she needed a name, and I called her Kirazamber, Kiraz for short.

Years went on, but to our sadness, July 2, 1999, our Kiraz disappeared from our balcony. Despite ads in newspapers, notes around the neighborhood, notifying Lost Animal Resources, weekly visits to the animal shelter and a whole lot of midnight searching with our dog Tommy, we never got her back. We still miss her, but hope that she is either living happily with a loving person or at the Rainbow Bridge. Our other cat Max got lonely though, so after 3 weeks we decided to adopt another cat. This cat was Zoe. Zoe was a lot slimmer than the cats I was used to, but not an Oriental yet.
When I went to a cat show 2 weeks later, I completely fell in love with Maestro, a black spotted tabby Oriental Longhair who has been our stud for over 3 years and is now retired. Now this was love at first sight!!
Before, I always considered the Orientals to be anorexic, and not attractive at all. Of course, this feeling has changed! :-)
I started to get involved in the world of breeding and showing and decided to go for a cattery name. But what name??

Then, I realized, if it had not been for Kiraz, I would never have gotten Zoe and Maestro. So it is all 'thanks' to Kiraz' disappearance that we came into touch with the Orientals. Therefore, in her honor, we named our cattery KIRAZAMBER.

Oh, and a little funny, although completely unimportant fact: Kiraz is Turkish for cherry.