View across the dense residential quarters of the old city. From The Sultan Abdul Hamid II's Photographic Albums, Library of Congress, Washington

Fire was an ever-present element in the life of the Ottoman city. Traditional wooden houses and narrow streets increased the likelihood that fires, once they had taken hold, would engulf entire neighborhoods. Between 1853 and 1906 a total of 229 serious fires were recorded in the city, with the greatest conflagration, the fire of 1865, devastating a huge section of the city between the Golden Horn, the Sea of Marmara, and Hagia Sophia. Responsibility for fighting fires rested at first with the Janissaries and the city's water carriers; the first fire-fighting units (tulumbacis) equipped with pumps of a French-design were formed in the early eighteenth century; and a regular city fire-brigade was created in 1873.