Public debate in Turkey on the massacres of Armenians during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire has long been constrained by law as well as by the structures of the public sphere, most prominently regarding the usage of the term genocide. The issue has constituted a serious taboo throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, and attempts to challenge official narratives have provoked harsh reactions from both state and civil actors. This taboo has also imposed a heavy burden on the Armenian minority in Turkey, perpetuating an uneasy majority-minority relationship. Simultaneously an elite formation and a counter-public, liberal public intellectuals in Turkey construe this limitation on public discourse as a symptom of the deep-set nationalist ideology permeating state and society, posing a key obstacle to furthering the democratic development of the republic. Drawing on personal interviews as well as key texts, this paper offers three case studies examining the engagement of public liberal intellectuals in Turkey. The first covers the ”alternative” academic conference on the atrocities against Armenians during the fall of the Ottoman empire, held in Istanbul in 2005, illustrating how liberal intellectuals breeched the taboo in the academic community as well as framed the event as well as the issue itself as central to the democratization process in Turkey. The second explores a series of public actions following the murder of the Turkish-Armenian intellectual Hrant Dink in 2007, commemorating Dink and his role in Armenian-Turkish dialogue while protesting the Turkish state’s flawed investigation of the murder. The final case study examines the campaign to collect signatures for a public apology for the crimes committed against Armenians in 1915, showing how these intellectuals sought to form a new public challenging the dominant official view and thereby transforming public discourse. In their dual role as knowledge producers and activists, through these actions liberal intellectuals construe both 1915 and the 2007 assassination as two interrelated national traumas and use these to show the need to deal with the ideological underpinnings of the Turkish Republic. With these events the past, present and future of the Armenian minority’s situation are connected and used to challenge the state-enforced narratives of Turkish nationalism and history, to democratize the Turkish public sphere and re-imagine citizenship in Turkey.