Born into one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of Ottoman Crete, Ahmet Cevat Emre (1876-1961) led an eventful life. After his early education in autonomous Crete, he developed a trajectory similar to that of Abdülhamid’s opponents during the 1890s. Like many Young Turks, he was exiled to Libya from where he made his escape to Europe. Following the Constitutional Revolution in 1908, he joined other like-minded reformists in Istanbul, where he penned articles in the press and taught Turkish philology and literature in the Darülfünun. In his post-imperial life that overlapped with the first four decades of the Turkish republic, Ahmet Cevat continued his career as a linguist, educator, editor, and parliamentarian. Despite bearing witness to and taking part in many transformative events both in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish republic, his life has attracted little scholarly interest. The foremost goal of this paper is to juxtapose Ahmet Cevat’s intellectual and political career with his Cretan origins. He began his post-revolutionary career in Istanbul as the impact of the conflict on his native island permeated the Ottoman public life through daily reports in the press and empire-wide rallies and economic boycott of Greece. Cretans who had, only a decade ago, left the island as refugees acted as the engine of this movement, some as porters refusing to unload the cargo of Greek ships and some others as vigilantes preventing customers from entering Greek shops. Though ardent opponents of Greece, and occasionally even Greek-Ottomans, most Muslim Cretans—including Ahmet Cevat—were native speakers of Greek. He spoke no Turkish until the age of seven yet went on to become one of the most authoritative figures on Turkish language and it is this tension that provides the setting for my paper. By drawing on Ahmet Cevat’s writings on language from empire to republic and his memoir published in 1960, this paper will explore the interplay between the native and adopted language. It will do this in the context of Cretans’ origin narratives at a time of growing anti-Greek feeling in the Ottoman Empire and later in the Turkish nation-state.