The last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century were a time of momentous upheavals and changes for the Ottoman Empire, during which the First World War was but one of a whole series of disastrous armed conflicts which had started with the war against Russia in 1876 that triggered many years of unrest in the Balkan provinces. This chapter analyses how a Turk and a Sephardic Jew remember the Balkan crisis and the impact it had on their personal lives. The experiment in parliamentary democracy that the "Second Constitutional Period" brought over the three years following the Young Turk revolution deteriorated to what was in effect a one-party dictatorship by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). The chapter focuses on Ottoman capital and a very special facet of the late Ottoman situation, the rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II and its violent end.