In 1904, an Ottoman aide-de-camp embarked on a trip that would take him by sea to Marseille, then to Port Said, and from there south to Djibouti and on land to Harar and Addis Ababa. This Ottoman gentleman and officer by the name of Sadik al-Moayyad Azmzade, was no stranger to long trips to the southern frontiers of the empire. A few years before his trip to East Africa, he took dangerous journeys to the Libyan Desert, and a few years later to Central Africa and the Hijaz. All of his trips had one thing in common; he was representing Sultan Abdülhamid II on sensitive missions that had empire wide implications in the age of inter-imperial competition in Africa and the Red Sea Basin. The journey to Addis Ababa was no different, taking this itinerant Ottoman officer to meet with Emperor Menelik II to discuss ways that the two empires can cooperate to beat encroaching European colonialism in Africa. While he was on these journeys, he kept detailed travelogues, some of which were published and survived till today. These travelogues provide fascinating insight into the mental geography of an Ottoman man who finds himself forced to question his position in the world. Azmzade occupied an interesting subject position: Azmzade was born and raised in Damascus and Aleppo; lived most of his adult life in Istanbul; was educated in Beirut, Istanbul and Berlin; and traveled extensively in Europe, Anatolia and Arabia. At this point in his life he found himself forced to come to terms with a rapidly changing world with encroaching European colonialism, the rise of ethno-religious nationalism inside the empire, and was conflicted by various models of “modernity.” On his journey to East Africa and through Ethiopia, he encountered peoples and cultures that allowed him the opportunity to reflect at what was “self” vs. “other” in a world where he, as an “Arab” Ottoman found himself increasingly in liminal identiterian position. Using this travelogue in the context of his life, for this paper, I will discuss the place that travelogues occupied in the journey of soul searching at the end of the Age of Empire and their use in the righting of history of the late Ottoman Empire.