The Mihrişah Valide Sultan Imaret in Istanbul's Eyüp district is an Ottoman public kitchen founded in 1792. A 2016 local report recorded that it served hot food to nearly 2,000 people a day and that hundreds of young and elderly Istanbul residents stood in long lines waiting to be fed. Some arrived with containers to carry food home to their families; others ate inside.
Imarets were charitable institutions supported through waqf endowments, historically feeding poor residents, travellers, and students. This late-eighteenth-century foundation continued to answer a modern city's needs, including those of Syrian refugees and unhoused people. A container in the queue did not necessarily represent only the person holding it: it might also stand for relatives unable to come. The order in which meals were collected linked a surviving Ottoman institution to everyday urban welfare more than two centuries later.