“Doğubeyazıt is the fourth most Kurdish city in Turkey,” I am told by the owner of an internet cafe as an impatient soldier nudges me to pay. I leave without an explanation of the ranking system or a completed list. As I walk down İsmail Beşikçi Street, named after the Turkish scholar who served 17 years in prison for his “pro-Kurdish” writings, I wonder what comes after Diyarbakır, the “Kurdish capital.” Istanbul could be second, more Kurds live there than any other city in the world. Any of the cities on the nightly news, Kurdish teenagers throwing stones at Turkish police, more commonly known by their Kurdish names, Colemêrg (Hakkarı) or Gewer (Yüksekova), could take second and third place. There always seems to be a slight pause when people call Doğubeyazıt, Bazîd. However, the statement is not a criticism of the city’s commitment to the Kurdish struggle. The town has been run by a “pro-Kurdish” municipality since the end of the 1990’s. In fact, both the current and former mayor are women, suggesting that the city also supports the movement’s gender policies. And on the walls of the local BDP office, surrounding a picture of the imprisoned Kurdish leader, Abdullah Öcalan, are numerous photographs of local PKK martyrs. Perhaps this ranking points to the city's historical insignificance? However, just outside the city is the mausoleum of Kurdistan’s most famous poet and philosopher Ehmedê Xanî (1651-1707). If we flip through the booklet, Doğybeyazıt’s Natural Treasures, written in Kurdish, Turkish and English, on page 57 we come across a list of local organizations that includes İlimizi geri istiyoruz derneği (We Want our Capital Status Returned Society). This refers to the city’s position as a capital during Ottoman rule and alludes to the Kurdish nationalist rebellion, the Mount Ararat Rebellion (1927-1930), that led to the loss of this status. What the tracing of this fragment reveals is not what “Kurdish history” but “how history works” (Trouillot 1995). Rather than viewing the historical imagination produced and performed in Turkey’s “fourth most Kurdish city” as mimetic re-appropriation of the state or as an identity narrative, I suggest reading it between the state and the nation. How these histories work, whether in everyday encounters, on street signs, or during martyr’s funerals, is through an ambiguity over state and nation. What these histories "do" is imagine forms of belonging beyond the limiting political horizons of the two.