In this article, I argue that the concept of ‘conviviality’, at least in a non-elitist understanding, allows us to pay closer attention to the conditions under which people of different ethnic, linguistic, religious and national backgrounds and of all social strata managed to live together peacefully in the late Ottoman Empire. This phenomenon, which can be observed in port cities in particular, has often been discussed under the term of ‘Ottoman cosmopolitanism’. The latter term, both in its wider usage and in the historiography linked to the Ottoman Empire, has become heavily laden with moral prescripts often originating in particular Western, liberal ideas. I will argue here that ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘conviviality’ can be seen as complementing each other, the former tendentially (albeit not exclusively) focussing more on elite interactions and emphasising the interactions of people of different ethnic and religious origin, the latter opening a window onto the quotidian practices of everyday interactions by people regardless of their origin. Evidently, there are large areas of overlap between both concepts; nevertheless, it might be useful to separate them heuristically.