While port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were for a long time vilified, recent local and international interest has rehabilitated them, turning them into a projection site for nostalgia for the pre-nation state multicultural order. While simplifications and especially characterizations of the nineteenth-century port cities as a social utopia must be revoked by critical historians, the highly ambivalent and mixed Eastern Mediterranean societies nonetheless need to receive proper attention in order to counter oversimplified visions of cultural identities and intercultural clash. A complex reading of nineteenth-century port city society thus serves as a counter discourse against a Weberian sense of the Asian City or its contemporary vulgarizations, such as the worldviews propagated by S. P. Huntington or R. T. Erdogan.