My paper investigates the current political contestations over cultural heritage and historical memory in Dersim, a mountainous enclave situated between the southern tip of Armenian highlands and upper Mesopotamian steppes. More specifically, it explores the tensions between the cultural policies implemented by the Turkish state and the responses of the minoritized Alevi Kurdish natives of the city. Dersim is a city populated by Kurdish Alevis, a double minoritized group who constitute both a religious and ethnic minority and who were subjected to genocidal violence in 1937-38 during the formation of modern Turkey. The renaming of Dersim as “Tunceli” (Steel-hand) at this juncture has since meant to seal the history and identity of Dersim in the genealogy of sovereign violence. Yet, over the past century, Kurdish Alevi survivors in Dersim have also continually resisted any sovereign resolution of the “Dersim thorn,” to quote the state discourse, by engaging in counterhegemonic struggles of power, identity, and memory. Within this historical backdrop, my paper specifically addresses how Kurdish Alevi natives of Dersim have negotiated their ethno-religious identities and belonging as they joined revolutionary struggles against the Turkish Republican socio-political order or articulated struggles for the recognition of their histories, memories, and contemporary presence in Dersim. Placing the Turkish government's recent representation of Dersim as the “city of peace” within the aforementioned genealogy of violence, I ask how Alevi Kurdish inhabitants of the city articulate alternative historical memories and spatial representations. I examine different sites of memory, such as visual displays and museum enactments, and trace the emergence of conflictual historiographies in Dersim. I contend that the Turkish government's current efforts to portray Dersim as a peaceful city are part of an overarching neoliberal agenda to position Dersim as a tourist destination serving the wider Turkish population. The state's initiative involves erasing the diverse identity and cultural heritage of the local population in order to incorporate Dersim into Turkish nationhood. My research highlights the racialized dimension inherent in political decisions that determine which communities are granted the opportunity to safeguard their history and cultural heritage. Through an analysis of counter-hegemonic memory-making practices, such as visual displays of the violent past in the public sphere and the construction of monuments of the local resistance leaders by locals, this paper interrogates the politics of memory and materiality and affective registers of conflictual historiographies.