Despite continuous attempts to annul it, the Ottoman hour system, known as gurubi saat or alaturka saat outlived the empire. In fact, it remained widely used even after it was outlawed in 1925. The proposed presentation suggests an ‘emotional explanation’ to the resilience of the alaturka system in the last Ottoman decades. The study of temporality in recent years has demonstrated the intricate ways through which the socio-political order shapes prevalent uses and understandings of time, which in turn serve to stabilize the socio-political order. The alaturka hour system was not exceptional in this respect. Yet, I argue that in order to reach a better understanding of Ottoman temporality, of any temporality, we must go beyond questions of power. If the alaturka system was a conceptual cage that reflected and served the power structures that created it, for many people it was a home they were reluctant to leave. It was a system that underpinned a way of life and abandoning it raised profound anxieties. As author Ahmed Ha?im (d. 1933) has written in his famous ‘Muslim Clock’: “Those old hours marked the death of our fathers, the wedding days of our mothers, our own births, the departure of caravans and the conquest of enemy cities. The foreign hours which replaced them upset our lives, resetting them according to an unknown code of laws, and making them unrecognizable to our spirits.” In short, what I seek to explain is not so much what people thought about time but how they felt about it. These feelings, I argue, explain the longevity of the alaturka system no less than rationalized ideological debates in the parliament, or in the press. In order to sketch the contours of late Ottoman urban routines and the way they conformed to the alaturka system, I rely on a wide set of sources, from archival documents, through newspapers and on to personal narratives. I then identify these same contours in contemporary novels and short stories in an attempt to identify recurring ‘emotional scripts’ that were associated with specific time-related practices (such as setting the clocks at sunset). I conclude by demonstrating how these emotions were played out in the struggle between the forces that sought to annul the alaturka system, and those who rose to defend it.