Contrary to its depiction by the early republican regime, Ottoman Ankara housed a sizable non-Muslim population, the majority of whom were Armenians. As the Armenian Question unfolded violently in the empire from 1890s onwards, there were a number of developments that could have generated inter-communal tensions in the city but did not do so. The arrival of Muslim refugees from 1860s and especially of Circassians in 1895, the internal exile of the Druze rebels in 1890s and 1910s from Greater Syria, the handling of some of the court cases related to 1897 Tokat incidents and 1909 Cilician pogroms in Ankara as the seat of regional court of appeals all failed to disturb tranquillity in the city. The potentially most explosive instant, however, was the Ankara trial of 1893 in which hundreds of actual or alleged Hnchak activists of central Anatolia who were accused of posting anti-Hamidian placards were tried. The high-profile trial alarmed the Ottoman government and even led to the organization of a rally in London, but did not lead to any inter-communal tension in the city. This paper proposes to consider all those instances of risk of inter-communal clash and especially the trial of 1893 within the context of cosmopolitanism that has manifested itself in Ankara until its violent destruction in 1915-16. In addition to the central Ottoman documents that are available, the study will also make use of more local sources, especially the Ankara Vilayet Gazetesi, which, after 1885, became less ‘official’ and thus richer in content, and memoirs written by Muslims and Armenians. The paper moves away from approaches to cosmopolitanism that reduce the concept to coexistence of ethnic communities, and nostalgic views, and defines it as a disposition of openness to the world and to the Other practiced in concrete contexts. The cosmopolitanism in Ankara in the late nineteenth century derived from the mundane, the everyday; from, among others, interacting in the same streets, living in mixed neighbourhoods, socializing together in coffeehouses, conducting business together, and being members of the same guild or trade union. Yet, in addition, it showed itself in troubled times. Aware of the methodological risks involved in making an argument based on absence, the paper argues that the refusal of Ankara Muslims and Armenians to be immersed in the tensions and clashes that engulfed Anatolia in 1890s was also a practice of cosmopolitanism.