The Hidden Temple (1919) by Omer Seyfettin is one of the most read stories in Turkey. It is a text based on the East-West opposition that continued in Ottoman society for nearly two centuries. In the story, the Ottoman-Turkish intellectuals' view of Western culture and the Western intellectuals' view of Eastern culture are narrated in a humorous style. The author describes the effort of a European intellectual to discover some signs that he thought represented Eastern culture in Istanbul and to make sense of these signs. In the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, many European intellectuals such as Lamartine, Wambery, Peirce, Pierre Loti, Clauda Ferriere, Alexandre Borzensky came to the Ottoman State, especially Istanbul, and explained their observations about the Ottoman-Turks social structure in many works. In this period the signs of the East were understood differently by European intellectuals. Western intellectuals' view of the complex signs of Eastern culture attracted the attention of Ömer Seyfettin. The main topic of The Hidden Temple is that two civilizations give different meanings to the same signs and interpret the same signs differently. The author has used many signs to explain this opposition.In this paper, the basic signs in The Hidden Temple will be determined, classified and analyzed by taking into account the relationships between them. Thus, how two different civilizations that developed together but were different from each other gave meaning to the same signs will be evaluated based on the story.