This paper argues that geopolitical knowledge is formulated through encounters in the city. Based on an analysis of essays, poems, caricatures, and short dialogues published in Turkish satirical journals (Akbaba, Aydede, Kelebek, Karagöz) during the period of Allied occupation, this paper examines humorous representations of urban and geopolitical, encounters. Urban encounters, and the humorous texts that translated them for Turkish readers, informed Istanbullu knowledges of the late Ottoman geopolitical situation. Rather than viewing the city as merely a stage upon which local experiences of geopolitical and national events would be enacted, this paper argues for a multi-scalar approach to geopolitics that considers the role of urban materiality in processes of imagining the larger social and political world. People interpet geopolitical events and discourses in the city, as they collide with and encounter material things and other people: the city thus plays a constitutive role in the production of geopolitical knowledge. Satire is a primary source for understanding the meanings produced through interactions among people and environments. I explore how urban encounters (among Istanbullu residents and Allied soldiers; among Turks and Armenians or Greeks; between ‘European’ and ‘local’ women and men) reverberate with depictions of geopolitical encounters (specific representations of Ottoman and European military or political figures, depictions of the Ottoman state in a human form) on the same page. While urban, national, and geopolitical discourses seem to exist at different scales, satirical texts and images suggest that they inform one another and are encountered together in daily urban life. Humorous representations of encounter in this period are important because they illuminate the meaning-making of a powerful geopolitical moment during which Ottoman and Turkish identities were defended and debated, debates that would later structure local imaginations of the Turkish nation. Istanbul is not only a material site of encounter, but is a generative context that conditions processes that reverberate beyond the city itself. Satirical journals were not only read and shared in the streets and coffeehouses of the city, but were also disseminated widely. The satirical press, imbued with urban knowledge, played an important role in creating geopolitical knowledges among readers. Reading satirical journals as geopolitical sources means collapsing conventional scalar assumptions regarding the authors and actors of geopolitics in the Middle East, examining the role of material urban environments, and writing ordinary things, peoples, and places into processes of geopolitical knowledge.