Despite the rich corpus on the provincial notables of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which came to be renowned as “the age of the ayans”, the notables almost disappear in the Ottoman historiography following the promulgation of the Tanzimat edict in 1839. Recent revisionist studies have reinterpreted the significance of the provincial notables by locating the power struggle between the provinces and the central government beyond the scope of a zero-sum game. While focusing on the participation of the notables in local politics and/or administration, the revisionist trend neglects, to a certain extent, the fate of the hereditary notables of the earlier centuries. Departing from the cases of the Hoxholly dynasty in Dibra and the Zirki emirs in Diyarbekir, this paper, reinserts the provincial notables of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century into the Tanzimat proper in a comparative context. Contrary to the binary oppositions the nineteenth-century Ottoman historiography has brought about, this study claims that the simultaneous and contingent coexistence of flexible imperial policies along with the centralisation reforms weaved the provincial politics of the empire. For that matter, it focuses, first of all, on the tension between retaining provincial notables and appointing central officials in provincial administration. Rather than the appointed officials prevailing over the local intermediaries, the tension was ambivalent and contingent prompting the parties to take several considerations into account. Second, by following the political careers of the exiled members of the Hoxholli dynasty and the Zirki emirs, this paper demonstrates how the provincial notables banished to the distant provinces of the empire conjured up another form of “provincial” politics thanks to their transregional networks. Elaborating that the provincial notables, either in their provinces or the distant ones, continued to be prominent actors in provincial politics, this paper argues that the “central” features of the nineteenth-century Ottoman local administration was “provincial.” Such a perspective has the potential to prompt questions to reconsider both comparatively reconsider the agency of provincial notables in a post-imperial setting and the commensurability of Ottoman state formation with other empires.