This paper analyzes famine-time social relations and state-society relations by focusing on the famine that took place in Ankara in 1845. The state (meaning the center and its agents in the provinces) responses to the famine, and the relationship between these responses and the ways that the society (mainly the poorer sects) responded to the crisis are the main focuses. The paper argues that the idea of a benevolent Ottoman state that takes care of its fellow subjects is not valid for the case of Ankara of 1845; instead, it claims that the power relations and clashes of interests between central authority and the agents of state in the provinces, and between different provincial agents themselves, ended up in nothing but discrimination (stockpiling grain and bread, not distributing the state support, hiding the food stocks remaining in the granaries, etc). Within that picture, the inhabitants of urban Ankara had to rely on their own tactics of survival like migration, begging and resorting to crime. Moreover, examples demonstrate that those who found their own “ways of survival” did not even tend to conform with the norms of the administration/state in order to get state support after the first waves of famine. In that sense it can be argued that there had been a clash between state-support and survival. Through reading between the lines of official newspapers (Takvim-i Vakayi and Ceride-i Havadis), registers and reports from the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, that are produced by the Ottoman center and local administrators, and through various petitions signed by inhabitants of Ankara, state-society relations and the responses to famine on the side of both state and society are analyzed. In that sense, the paper argues that the famine of 1845 can be read as an example of how environmental calamities forced some to “invent” different tactics of survival (from changing eating habits to “putting aside” social norms) while they allowed some to maximize their profits, at the expense of worsening the consequences of the disaster.