Historical collective shelters, yahuthanes or cortejos, are an alternative form of housing that were developed to providesecure sheltering of the groups who were disadvantaged in terms of economic, social, and cultural aspects in the Ottomancity. They have played a significant role in history as a building type that made possible cohabitation of groups, withmoral and material problems, and struggling to maintain their integrity despite hardship. This study deals with a groupof historical collective shelters in the traditional commercial center of İzmir dating mainly to the late 19th and early 20thcenturies. The objective is to understand the historic evolution of collective shelters (yahuthane, cortejo) in Hurşidiye,Kurtuluş and Sakarya neighborhoods of Konak district in İzmir, to define their cultural values, to analyze their socialand spatial development, to present their physical characteristics and evaluate their preservation problems. Elevencollective shelters were documented in the studied site, which is a portion of the traditional commercial center of İzmir(Kemeraltı). The site comprehends the ruins of the Roman Agora and the remains of the public buildings dating to thepre-modernization period of the Ottoman Empire as well as the late Ottoman urban layout. As a method, the preliminarystudies were reviewed, the land registers were surveyed, the present base map together with the historical maps wereoverlapped and the case studies were conducted using conventional techniques of architectural and urban conservation.The study has documented the interaction of Muslim and Jewish communities and how the collective living habits of theseethnic groups living in collective shelters differed from standard residential life at the end of the 19th and beginning of the20th centuries in the traditional commercial center of İzmir. Though collective shelters in the historic center of İzmir havebeen studied in the literature, their specific location on the map was not available. This study has provided locations of theshelters and evaluated the architectural characteristics of their remains. The traces and remains of the historic collectiveshelters should be preserved as elements contributing to the integrity of the multi layered city.