In the last fifty years of the Ottoman Empire, over a million refugees from the Russian Empire’s North Caucasus region arrived in the Ottoman domains for permanent settlement. These trans-regional migrants profoundly transformed Ottoman demographics, socio-cultural environments, and labor markets. State-centered historical accounts - the great bulk of the existing literature - marginalize their voices. This paper discusses different ways, in which we can recover refugees’ voices and restore their historical agency. By focusing on papers, written by refugees themselves, this paper will explore how the North Caucasians understood and articulated their new political and social status and investigate different ways of writing refugees’ agency into their own history. Petitions, written by refugees and their representatives to various local, regional, and imperial agencies, are a fascinating source of information about the migrants’ concerns and grievances. They underscore the refugees’ engagement with the authorities and sketch out boundaries, within which interactions between immigrants and the state occurred. Collective petitions also reflect the immigrants’ perceptions of what the Ottoman state expects from its new residents and their own standing with the state and within their host societies. Private letters, sent by refugees to their families in the Caucasus, a type of primary source rare to come by, tell us a story of North Caucasus refugees as trans-imperial migrants. These letters, not devoid of self-imposed censorship, shed light on refugees’ immediate needs in exile and family reunification-related issues. The paper is based on archival documents in Istanbul’s Prime Minister Archive, Sofia’s Sts. Cyril and Methodius National Library, and Tbilisi’s State Historical Archive.