On August 12, 1877, English philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts appealed to the humanity and Christian charity of readers of the Daily Telegraph, beseeching them to send relief to Muslim women and children displaced by the 1877-1878 Russo-Ottoman War, a conflict that would uproot more than a million Balkan Muslims. On August 15, she announced the formation of the Turkish Compassionate Fund (TCF), an organization intended to aid non-combatants. Soon after, Sultan Abdülhamid II disseminated an album of photographs of wounded Muslim refugees to European ambassadors in Istanbul. British Ambassador A.H. Layard forwarded the album to London, cautioning that the Sultan was convinced Europe held no compassion for Muslim suffering; the ambassador hoped the TCF would persuade the Sultan that “England” did. Over the next two years, the TCF channeled money through Layard and the British consular corps to provide food, clothing, and housing for refugees throughout Rumelia and Western Anatolia. The fund’s soup kitchens fed nearly 17,000 in Istanbul in mid-February of 1878, and an offshoot of the fund employed refugee women into the 1890s. For those displaced by the war, the TCF’s relief may have made the difference between life and death. Historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ottoman refugees have incorporated the lenses of health and environment in their accounts of migrant experiences. Scholars have described epidemics, tabulated devastating mortality rates in port cities, and considered the role of famine and malaria in migrant settlement. Focusing on TCF’s relief effort and using materials from the Ottoman State Archive, the British Foreign Office, and published primary sources, this paper contributes to scholars’ evolving narrative of the tragic matrix of sickness and death experienced by Ottoman immigrants. The paper explores the evolution of “the refugee” as a social category and examines how Abdülhamid II, officials, diplomats, observers, and philanthropists generated images and stories about forced migrants. It argues that aid and philanthropy were processes unfolding at multiple scales and within multiple spaces – across diplomatic channels, in Victorian parlors, on the shores of the Black Sea, at railway stations in Rumelia and mosques in Istanbul, and eventually in the exhibition halls of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Portrayals of Muslim refugees reflected domestic and international politics, ideas of sanitation, and ideologies of civilization, nationalism, welfare, and productivity. Ultimately, the construction and consumption of “the refugee” as a worthy object of aid conditioned migrants’ trajectories and material outcomes.