In the early modern period, maps held ideological and symbolic meanings to empower their users and readers to order and envision the world, to construct their territories, and to shape their identities both imperial and personal. ‘Ottoman Empire,’ for example, was a cartographic construction and so was being an Ottoman. This paper aims to investigate the close relationship between geographical works and articulation of multiple facets of Ottoman identity in the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire. The end of the sixteenth century saw a radical transformation in the character and use of maps. After Ptolemy’s Geography was translated into Latin in the early fifteenth century, humanist scholars in Europe were exposed to a set of new techniques. Ptolemy’s works introduced a geometric approach to the depiction of space that was defined by the celestial grid of longitude and latitude. In the same period, innovations in printing and the expansion of a commercial market increased circulation as maps found a new audience, literate urbanites. Commercial map-printing houses of Italy and the Netherlands contributed to the standardization of maps used and distributed across Europe. Mapping in this period shaped how cartographers, urban literati, and ruling elites conceived space, political power, and identities. Although this development impacted the Ottoman world, the Ottoman cartographers and their works have not yet fully been integrated into these discussions. This paper will investigate how the Ottoman geographers formulated and shaped the imperial as well as personal meanings of how to be an Ottoman in the seventeenth century through a historical analysis of cartographical works by Katip Çelebi (d. 1657) and Ebu Bekir ibn Behram ed-Dimashki (d. 1691). Both these geographers were active members of the intellectual community in the imperial capital and had close connections to the global networks of knowledge and politics. On the one hand, they were in command of the traditional works of cartography that were popular especially among the ruling circles. On the other hand they were in constant search for contemporaneous and more “accurate” cartographical information to please and at the same time educate their readers. This paper will argue that their dual intellectual stance between old and new, traditional and contemporaneous were reflected in their works and how they envisioned the world, the Ottoman Empire, and what it meant to be an Ottoman.