Tlgadinsti (Hovhannes Harootiunean) was one of the early provincial authors of modern Ottoman Armenian literature. He was a native of Kharpert (Harput, a neighborhood of Elazığ today), a cosmopolitan Ottoman city in the East Anatolia. Tlgadintsi as a prolific author, not only wrote short stories and plays, but also produced essays for national newspapers and journals. His contemporaries in Istanbul praised his writings and in this way, he became almost a member of national intellectual elite. In this paper I aim to understand the making of a provincial writer in the age of nationalism. By analyzing Tlgadintsi’s and his fellow students’ literary work and Kharpert represented, I endeavor to develop a different perspective to reevaluate the emergence of modern literature in the Ottoman world which is generally accepted as a 19th century phenomenon original to Istanbul.