“Farewell to thee, land of the beloved, land of the dear ones, when will we meet again?” These are the last words that nineteen-year old Alexander Svoboda uttered in Arabic as he left his native home of Baghdad and embarked on his first westward journey to the cultural capital of Europe—Paris—on April 15th, 1897. Svoboda maintained a diary of the journey in Arabic. In 1900, however, when he made his return journey to Baghdad with a new French wife, he narrated his experiences in English. Svoboda appeared to be a changed man after his time in Europe, a man who began to reevaluate his identity as he was leaving Paris as it was gearing up for the 1900 Exposition Universelle for Baghdad. What is immediately striking about the two diaries is that they are written in two different languages: the first in a mixed dialect of Arabic spoken in Baghdad and the latter in an unmastered English riddled with grammatical and spelling errors. The two journals however, are not merely examples of Svoboda expressing himself in different languages. Rather, they reference distinct systems of cognition, specifically demonstrating an evolution of how he understands and hierarchically orders his once beloved homeland vis-à-vis European cities. His diaries provide a micro-narrative of how an individual with a highly contested and complex identity at the turn of the twentieth century negotiated his class, religious, geographic and linguistic identities when faced on the one hand by the accelerated modernization in Europe, and on the other hand, by the rise of nationalist ideologies in the Ottoman realm.