Throughout the Ottoman classical ages, the evkaf (pl. of vakıf, or the religious endowments) were the primary institutions for public service in the Ottoman towns. The evkaf allocated public resources, war booty and agricultural surplus to many important causes, from urban infrastructure, to civil education and health service, from soup kitchens for the poor, to the maintenance of religious sanctuaries and provisioning of loans to the needy community members. With this function, the evkaf bolstered the legitimacy of the House of Osman as well as their dignitaries in the provinces, and, for that reason, extortion of the evkaf property was a great taboo. However, this taboo shattered after 1826, when the evkaf and their revenues were taken under the control of the Ministry of Evkaf. The state never openly extorted the vakıfs, yet, as their revenues began to be transferred to the other sectors the state needed, the evkaf became impoverished. This opened the gates for the commercialization of the evkaf property. This paper discusses how this process worked in the case Bursa, setting forth some cases on the basis of research in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives. These cases demonstrate some of the patterns whereby the evkaf were converted into private property in the 19th century. Usurpation of the evkaf by the industrialists is one of them. Another is to sacrifice of the evkaf property for the modernization projects of the state, including turning them into state enterprises or leasing them to the private sector. The third way is the reserving the vakıf land for the immigrant settlements, and therefore depriving the evkaf of their revenues. Was the commercialization of the evkaf an inevitable outcome of the process of modernization and integration to global capitalism in the 19th century? How might the preying on the vakıfs have brought about the social disputes and movements of the Ottoman period? With the analyses of the cases presented from Bursa, an Ottoman urban center of industrialization and global commerce of silk, the goal of this presentation is to open these questions for discussion.