In this paper I examine patterns of violence in Istanbul in the 1890s and early 1900s with reference to the amount and types of violence committed by war refugees. In particular I look at refugees from the 1878 Russo-Turkish war, both from the Balkans and from the Caucasus. I also look at refugees from later Balkan conflicts. I argue that refugees committed a disproportionate amount of criminal violence, and that their violent acts were often more extreme than those of other groups. There are no convenient statistical compilations covering acts of criminal violence in late Ottoman Istanbul. However, newspaper accounts and official police reports of violent incidents generally provide information about the perpetrator which includes place of origin and status, one category of status being 'refugee.' Thus although results must of necessity be somewhat tentative, there is strong evidence that refugee violence is qualitatively and quantitatively different from that of other groups. I also look at other factors which might incite this particular group to violence. I argue that factors such as poverty, which could cause this group to engage in higher levels of violence than the general population, are insufficient to explain the degree of difference from the patterns of the general population. The argument that exposure to and experience of violence can lead to an increased acceptance of and propensity to violence draws on the works of sociologists and anthropologists such as Norbert Elias and Anton Blok, and more directly for the Ottoman case on historian George Gawrych's 1986 article "The Culture and Politics of Violence in Turkish Society, 1903-14." The conflicts from which the subjects of my paper were fleeing were particularly brutal ones, and thus could be expected to have a particularly brutalizing effect, not only on those who participated in such acts of violence, but also those who were victims of these acts, or even those who only witnessed them.