This paper analyzes the large network of Ottoman vocational orphanages (ıslahhanes) opened from the 1860s onward in the provincial centers of the Ottoman Empire as a new educational and disciplinary institution for orphan, destitute, and poor children. I argue that ıslahhanes embodied new conceptualizations of order/disorder, obedience/disobedience, security/danger, and progress/decline in the urban space. In opening these institutions, Ottoman reformers aimed at the beautification and sterilization of urban centers by removing unattended children and youth from the streets and at the rejuvenation of economic activity by turning idle and wandering children into skilled and productive laborers. The establishment of orphanages was not only considered a means to solve a public-order problem but was also represented as a means of reintegration, of reshaping civic responsibility in children who had either lost or never embraced it. Islahhanes were also significant in the more abstract context of "Ottoman reform" and centralization and in the dissemination of Ottomanist ideals. On an imperial level, they were instrumental in linking the center with the provinces and local communities with Ottoman identity.The series of Ottoman legal and administrative reforms called the Tanzimat (reorganization), which were implemented between 1839 and 1876, were conceived by a small and influential segment of the imperial bureaucratic elite. 1 They were closely related to foreign diplomatic pressure regarding issues of right to life, liberty, and property of mainly non-Muslim subjects. Yet the reforms had a multiplier effect, bringing about several other developments in the long term. As Maurus Reinowski explains, different notions of "order" were at the heart of Tanzimat state ideology and political idioms. 2 The terms asayiş (public order, public tranquility) and emniyet (safety, security, the police, the law) were central to these notions. In line with the traditional circle of equity, security was granted in return for subjects' obedience. Especially from the 1860s onward, the new notion of order involved not only obedience but also conceptions of civilization (medeniyet) and discipline (inzibat). Within this framework, any form of disobedience or dissolution of order would be corrected with terbiye and tedib, which no longer simply Nazan Maksudyan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Zentrum