"A flame from a lamp or heating brazier might end with entire neighborhoods laid waste. Rebellious janissaries—the sultan’s corps of elite troops and bodyguards—might take out their frustrations by deliberately reducing thousands of houses to ash, leaving iron fixtures twisted, stone foundations exposed, and a third or more of the city in ruins. For much of the nearly five centuries of Ottoman governance, an Istanbullu could expect to experience at least two cataclysmic blazes in a lifetime. It was all so familiar that “fire epics”—long poems that narrated the terror of fire and the wonders of fate—have been part of Istanbul’s folk literature since the seventeenth century."