Ahmet Hikmet Müftüo?lu (1870-1927) is an Ottoman diplomat, intellectual and author best known for his Turkist ideas and historical fiction published at the beginning of the 20th century in the late Ottoman public sphere. Before the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, however, between 1893 and 1900, Ahmet Hikmet produced close to two dozen short stories, most of them published in the Ottoman journal Servet-i Fünun. These stories were later published as a short story collection called Haristan ve Gülistan in 1900. This paper will analyze social issues covered in several of these short stories related to gender identities, criticisms of patriarchy, marriage, platonic love and romance. These stories rarely touched on political or ideological issues, yet contributed important snapshots of Ottoman society, gender relations, society’s expectations, the perceptions of marriage as an institution, and the functioning of households as nuclear units of society. In addition to this, running through stories such as Ye?enim (My Nephew) and Nakiye Hala (Aunt Nakiye) we can also find a critique of Westernization and a portrayal of how war effects real lives in Ottoman households. Throughout this period, Ahmet Hikmet is playing with hybrid forms of narration and storytelling, as he moves between a fairy-tale structure in Haristan and Gülistan to a more realist, socially conscious short story form in Nakiye Hala and Ye?enim. It is therefore illuminating when the stories are analyzed in relation to each other as different tools with which Ahmet Hikmet visualized and criticized many different aspects of Ottoman identity at the time. The fact that these stories were first published in Servet-i Fünun is important as reading them allows us to locate these stories in the wider trend of Servet-i Fünun literati aspiring towards more aesthetic sensibilities. They provide for the reader a glimpse of the author before his writing became the major tool for disseminating Turkist ideals to his audience, when Ahmet Hikmet was possibly freer to play with and utilize different, hybrid modes of storytelling.