During the final decade of its existence, the Ottoman state sought to alter the imperial map by imposing new place names across the territory under its control. Beginning in 1913, committees consisting of local notables and government officials were created in order to expedite the erasure, often in bulk, of village and town names that were deemed inappropriate. In other cases, place name change was carried out by the central bureaucracy on a case-by-case basis. Although not executed systematically, place name change continued through the end of the Ottoman Empire and into the Republic of Turkey where, as in many nation states, it was an integral part of a broader process of homogenization. This study, using lists containing settlement names targeted for removal as well as other related documents found in the Ottoman State Archives, will seek to identify the rationales that led the state to rename hundreds of settlements across the empire throughout the years 1913-1923. I argue that the existence of divergence in the considerations, both ideological and practical, that lay behind these instances of renaming problematizes readings of late Ottoman history that are often too eager to assign an “official ideology” to the period. During this time of trauma and territorial contraction, the character of the much reduced Ottoman state was not a foregone conclusion. The issue of identity, both of the state itself and of its ideal subject/citizen, was one that would be contentious throughout the final years of the empire and into the republic. Examining attempts to inscribe a particular character onto the map contributes to a more developed understanding of how the state sought to create or redefine identity and how conceptions of a particular toponymic order reflected the concerns of those involved in this process. These attempts at place name change serve to defamiliarize our knowledge of governance in the late Ottoman Empire. Toponymical change, rather than being understood as a single Turkification project that began in 1913 and continued throughout the next eight decades, as is the case in previous studies, is analyzed within a broader context of imperial modernization. This study, which aims to move beyond debates that conceptualize the late Ottoman state in terms of Pan-Islamism, Pan-Turkism, or other “official” ideologies, argues that toponymical change was a technique of governmentality through which the map became a focal point in negotiating an Ottoman identity.