“Yes, we are Kurds, but we are also somehow Armenians,” an acquaintance in Mardin mentioned to me as he explained why he and his friends were eager to help me, an Armenian-American woman, in my attempt to learn Kurdish. He explained that many families, like his, have an Armenian ancestor, and if not, then that everyone at least knows someone with an Armenian relative and recognizes the significance of the historic Armenian presence in the region and the violent history of the destruction of the Armenian community. His remarks highlight the way in the history of Armenians is intertwined with the history of Kurds, and the ways in which Kurds imagine themselves partially through imagining Armenians. This process plays out not only in the realm of family lineages, local histories, and individual identities, but indeed is linked to larger political processes and discourses of nationalism and nationhood. In Turkey in particular, the politics of remembering and forgetting the Armenian past has been intertwined with the Kurdish struggle, repression of Kurdish communities, and a reimagining of the history of eastern Anatolia. These questions of the politics of history and memory were highlighted at the recent opening of a memorial in Diyarbakir, the Monument of Common Conscience, which reads in six languages “We share the pain so that it is not repeated.” At the opening ceremony, the Kurdish mayor of the city declared that the Kurds were apologizing in the name of their ancestors for the massacres and deportations of 1915 and called on the Turkish government to do the same. This incident indicates the way in which the history of the Armenian community in Turkey is politicized as well as inextricably linked to the Kurdish struggle. In this paper I will draw on ethnographic work that I carried out in Elazig, Mardin, and Van to explore the ways in which Kurds today imagine themselves through imagining Armenians, and how Kurds construct their own past and present by narrating the history of the departed Armenians. Where possible, I will explore the stories of Armenians who were assimilated into Kurdish communities after 1915, how their histories are remembered and narrated, and how they shape the lived experience and political subjectivities of Kurds today.