My paper addresses a highly debated topic in late Ottoman history: inter-communal violence between the Muslim and Christian communities of the Empire. Studies that focus on this topic have often focused on the Young Turk period and especially rested on the discussion of whether the CUP leaders' deportation of Armenians throughout World War I constituted an act of genocide or not. Out of this discussion, there emerged two contrasting and mutually exclusive literatures which either blamed the Great Powers or the Ottoman state for instigating the inter-communal violence of the late Ottoman period. By focusing on the immediate period after World War I, my paper intends to problematize this literature by testing their claims on the reasons and actors of the inter-communal violence that occurred in Maras during the first two months of 1920. The Maras uprising occurred during the time of the Turkish War of Independence when the Empire's territories were occupied by the victorious Entente Powers right after the Mudros Treaty of October 1918. Maras and its vicinity was firstly occupied by Britain following the treaty and then by France beginning from November 1919. Since the beginning of the French occupation, there occurred clashes between the Muslims and Armenians of the city although both the local and colonial authorities intervened in order to prevent further exacerbation of inter-communal violence. As the Maras uprising began in late January and ended twenty days later by French retreat from the region, the reasons behind its instigation and its outcome of French defeat have been the object of a disputed literature. The Turkish official historiography evaluated the Maras uprising as a heroic nationalist struggle against colonial occupation while certain Armenian scholars have evaluated it as a continuation of the genocidal policies of CUP since World War I, who were intent on massacring the Armenian survivors. My research, on the other hand, brings into scrutiny the claims of both literatures by problematizing the roles they ascribe either to the leaders of the nationalist movement or the French colonial state in terms of their control over the uprising. In other words, by focusing on the memoirs of the main actors involved in the conflict, as well as the published documents of the Ottoman Empire, France, and United States, my research the intends to narrate the uprising within the initiative of local actors instead of a direct outcome of French or Turkish state policy.