According to the Ottoman newspapers of Istanbul, on April 4, 1877, one of the most well-known bankers of the capital, Christos (also known as Christakis) Zografos started a trip with his family to a number of European cities including Napoli, Rome, and London. He had resigned from his position as a deputy in the Ottoman parliament where he had been elected after a series of protests by the Ottoman Greek community regarding the number of deputies allocated to represent it. At the same time, another well-known Ottoman Greek banker, Georgios Zarifis, was one of the closest consultants for the recently enthroned Abdulhamid II. Zarifis was one of Sultan’s personal financiers and met with him almost daily during a time of severe economic needs for the Ottoman Empire. The High Porte had to finance its impending war against the Russians though it had declared a default in 1875. Despite such references in primary sources, it is unclear how prominent members of the Ottoman Greek community navigated the rapidly changing political landscape of the first Ottoman constitutional period. Although there are quite a lot of studies on the politics of the imperial elite and the intellectuals of Ottomanism, we do not really know how these ideas were put into practice by members of the Ottoman public who did not have formal access to decision making. In my paper, I present the diverging approaches of Zografos and Zarifis toward the parliamentary experimentations of the High Porte and I explain how both, one fully embracing them and the other keeping its distance, belong to the spectrum of political strategies that can be described as Ottomanism. For my analysis, I focus on their political and economic activities to more accurately represent their strategies, while their relationship with previous Ottoman rulers (Abdülaziz, Murat V) and the kingdom of Greece are taken into consideration. Overall, I argue that significant portions of Ottoman society had interests in the survival of the empire without agreeing whether liberal institutions were necessary for this to happen. The fierce debates occurring in the Ottoman public sphere also reveal the eagerness of the public to use the newly granted political freedoms to articulate its thoughts on the future of the empire.