The purpose of this paper is to sketch in broad strokes the formation of modern public space and group consciousness via the escalating annual celebrations of the sultan in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. The process began in 1836, under Mahmud II, as yet another type of centralization – of subject (esp. non-Muslim) loyalties. It created an unprecedented avenue for direct cyclical symbolic engagement between the ruler and the ruled, core and periphery of Ottoman society on the basis of innovative conceptions and practices of (inclusive) faith and (universal) kingship. In the short run, these celebrations forged vertical ties of loyalty to the monarch, which were quite successful. In the long run, however, they contributed substantially to the creation of new, modern/national types of horizontal ties and group consciousness, which then crystallized in national movements and, after the empire’s demise, national monarchies. So far the scholarship on the late Ottoman relations between the Muslim ruler and his non-Muslim subjects has overwhelmingly treated them as a self-contained, mostly antagonistic set, taking non-Muslim types of group consciousness, based on theorized communal (millet) institutions, for granted. In contrast, this research reveals a foundational, but so far historiographically absent episode of the nineteenth-century history of this key concept. Rather than accommodate allegedly existing non-Muslim millet institutions, the sultanic celebrations in fact initiated the use of this term in official phraseology and communal life, and were thus instrumental in gradually forging its reality and metamorphoses. Therefore, this research demonstrates the limits of legitimate use of millet by Ottoman historians today, and the outright inadequacy of its continuing use in constructing primordial narratives. Finally, this line of analysis opens up not only new conceptual, but also new practical avenues for the study of ‘late empire’ and ‘early nation-state’ in the region and elsewhere.