Buildings have what materialist Jane Bennett identifies as a thing-power: they can inspire, provoke and generate emotions among attentive audiences who look at or visit them. But can these emotions really be considered a universal (biological) phenomenon that everybody would feel? The short answer is no. In this paper I shall demonstrate how the early modern Ottoman elite formed a joint emotional community, whose members were encouraged to practice a unique sense of bewilderment at Ottoman architecture. The early modern Ottoman elite translated bewilderment as wonder. A theory dealing with this emotion was first introduced to the elite in different medieval Islamic treatises written on Wonders-of-Creation. These treatises aimed to examine both the mental and physical nature of wonder. Readers were expected to experience this when they were unable to understand the cause of a thing or how it was supposed to influence them when they saw it for the first time. As such, cosmographies encourage their potential readers to turn sights of aesthetics experiences into an insightful experience of bewilderment/wonder. In early modern Ottoman chronicles, treatises on architecture (e.g., Mimar Sinan's autobiographies), and travelogues (e.g., Evliya Çelebi's Book of Travels), this notion of bewilderment is mentioned in the context of imperial Ottoman monuments. Members of the elite were advised to contemplate imperial complexes like the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul for instance, or the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, and turn their sights into an insightful experience of wonder. However, this kind of wonder cannot be considered a universal phenomenon; not all who visit these imperial buildings are automatically bound to be bewildered in the same way. Rather, the aforementioned emotional experience of wonder is exclusive to the potential readers who shared a joint early modern Ottoman mentality. Furthermore, this mentality did not continue among the Ottoman elite beyond the seventeenth century. At this point in history, with the influence of modern European studies on architecture, members of the elite abandoned the cosmographic theory of wonder and adopted the European perception of the aesthetics of the structures without the need for contemplation.