On the 13th of April 1909, Istanbul was woken up to slogans and gunshots coming from the Task??la barracks only nine months after the reinstatement of the constitution. While the mutineers who took the streets were soldiers, the protesters included students of religion, liberals and anti-Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) groups. The crowd was shouting for the reinstitution of Shariat and demanding the resignation of some leading Unionists in the cabinet; yet, quite surprisingly, they were also stressing their loyalty to the Constitution. The cabinet resigned the same day. As things seemed to calm down in the capital, the Third Army, stationed at Macedonia, began recruiting volunteers in order to march to the capital and save the constitution. Two week later when the Hareket Ordusu (the Action Army) eventually left, the empire had a new sultan, a new cabinet and a suspended constitution under martial law. Using mainly Ottoman archival documents, newspapers, autobiographies, eyewitness accounts, and sound recordings from the period, I explore the events by shifting the conventional focus on the mutiny itself to how the Action Army utilized the uprising to establish a new political order rather than simply “saving” the old one. I argue that the leaders of the Action Army who were influential figures of the CUP’s Balkan branch took this mutiny as an existential threat, yet turned it into an opportunity to “cleanse Istanbul” from the actors and traces of ancien régime and the liberal opposition. In so doing, they not only attempted to hijack the imperial politics but also transform Istanbul as an urban political space into an epitome of the empire imagined by the CUP elite. “Cleansing of Istanbul” was pursued through a series of administrative, legal and symbolic transformations. First, Sultan Abdulhamid II, and many other influential figures including the opposition were physically removed from Istanbul, and were replaced by “reliable” CUP cadres. Second, austere measures aimed to overawe the individuals under the martial law and restrain political freedoms by introducing a number of laws on right to assembly, press and strikes all between May-August 1909. Finally, the “creation” of a CUP-dominated Istanbul was celebrated and reinforced by re-naming city’s streets with the Action Army “heros,” printing card postal of the memorable moments of the events and constructing the first public commemorative monument of the modern times in Istanbul named “Statue of Freedom” and devoted to Action Army’s 71 befallen soldiers.