Taking three photographs of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ports of Izmir, Thessaloniki, and Istanbul as points of departure, the chapter investigates the question of why these highly diverse populations and the urban space they inhabited have been relegated to the margins of national and imperial histories of the Eastern Mediterranean. In particular, it claims that the port cities' myriad ways of blending particular aspects of modern Western and Central European culture with more regional characteristics warrants more attention in historiography.