This paper follows the stories of Halid bin Zeyd Ebû Eyyûb el-Ensari, the Companion of the Prophet Muhammad who died besieging Constantinople in the 7th century. The miraculous discovery of his tomb in 1453 was understood by many to be the founding story of an Ottoman Muslim Istanbul, and stories describing his life were circulated in a variety of media over the centuries. Yet these stories about Halid bin Zeyd were also stories about the neighborhood of Istanbul -- Eyüp -- which grew up around his tomb. More than simply narrating Halid bin Zeyd’s life and death, these stories became one mode through which diverse actors made normative claims about the neighborhood and the city around them. As many of my interlocutors argued during my fieldwork, “If he’d [Halid bin Zeyd] never existed, this [the present neighborhood of Eyüp] would never have been.” Borrowing the concept of ‘enactment’, this paper explores how the telling of Halid bin Zeyd’s story in three different moments -- the 1920s, the 1950s, and the present day -- drew the writer, a specific reading community, and their urban surroundings into a particular arrangement. These three writers -- Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, Ziya Şakir, and H. Cemal Öğüt -- all used Halid bin Zeyd to both make particular claims about the neighborhood of Eyüp and to make broader arguments about the importance of the past, the nature of proper religious belief, and the charecter of the city in which they lived. This paper thus reads these writers’ individual stories and situates those stories within their historically and geographically specific contexts. Doing so, I argue, helps us understand both why this particular story is important to this place and provides one perspective on how Istanbul comes to be lived and experienced as a particularly blessed city. More broadly, focusing on the interrelationship between the story of Halid bin Zeyd and that of Eyüp provides an opportunity to ask more general questions about how, through the telling of stories like this, cities come to be lived as meaningful environments.