Current scholarship on migration in the Middle East has explored the numerous ways in which migrants and the state have interacted in a framework of mobility and settlement. When considering the nineteenth-century context of the Ottoman Empire, these studies have shed light on new ways to understand the plethora of populations who moved and became new subjects and citizens of the empire. This paper introduces a new way to conceptualize these relationships by taking a cultural historical approach toward examining material objects that were embedded with a plethora of meanings that shaped the relationship between migrant and state and even amongst refugees themselves. It considers the aftermath of the Crimean War of 1853 – 1856 during which mass migrations of Crimean Tatars and other refugees sought sanctuary within Ottoman territories. This paper examines the cultural, political, and economic value of distributing and possessing “sacred bread.” In this manner, this paper argues that the symbolic currency of food or, more specifically, bread was a way to distinguish members of the refugee community called muhacirin in the Ottoman Empire. Food traditions such as that of sacred bread shaped not only refugee cultural identity, but also stratified refugee communities socially on the basis of class and social identity. More importantly, food played a significant role in transforming and acculturating refugee communities within Ottoman culture and served as a vector of cultural cohesion in the creation of a unifying force. By examining food systems, this paper expands our conception of the postwar experiences of muhacirs and permits a redefining of identity, subjecthood, and loyalty through the material reality and transaction of sacred bread.