Until the headquarters of the East Anatolian Imperial Army was deployed in 1831 on the plain of today’s Elazig in Turkey, no settlement existed aside from the gardens of the well-off families of Harput. The ancient town and citadel of Harput, located upon the hill overlooking the modern city of Elazig, was however among the most cosmopolitan, intellectual and commercial centers of the Ottoman East, hosting Islamic exegete, Armenian writers and Western missionaries. A century later, in the 1950s, the nascent settlement on the plain had grown into a middle-size town whereas Harput had turned into a ruined suburb of this new city. This paper will address the concurrent processes of abandonment and ruinization in Harput and of the emergence of Elazig as a new city in Eastern Turkey during the late Ottoman and early Republican periods. The urban history of the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire has been confined mostly to port cities with commercial value for the capitalist world economy. Hence, exclusive emphasis has been put on spatial modernization and progressivist mindsets instead of abandoned places and fragmented lives. The urban experience in the eastern provinces of the empire has yet to be accordingly addressed. This paper will examine the transitional dual-city experience of Harput/Elazig from 1850-1950, a phenomenon vastly analyzed in colonial contexts in Middle East and North Africa but rarely paid attention on in the contexts of non-colonial state formation. The paper seeks to understand the ruinization of Harput’s built environment in two periods of mobility. First, the bourgeoisie suburbanization in new Elazig and the moving out of Harput’s commercial classes in the 1870s-1900s took place hand-in-hand with the largely economically motivated emigration of young men from Harput to the Americas. The presence of American missionaries and of their renowned Euphrates College (1871-1915) turned Harput into the primary gate of the entire Eastern Anatolia for those who wanted to embark for the New World. Second, the first quarter of the twentieth century witnessed attempts of forced demolishment in Harput: the deportation of Armenians (30-35% of Harput’s population) in 1915 and the state-sponsored destruction and dismantlement of Harput’s built environment in the early Republican period of 1930s, both supervised from Elazig. The original data of this essay has been acquired through two years of research in the state archives, in the missionary archives and in newspaper collections.