It is now known to the scholars of Ottoman history, that there were several Crypto-Christian groups in different corners of the Empire. Despite their spatial, cultural, linguistic and religious variations, in addition to differences in trajectories and myths of origin, what deemed these groups akin was their narrative of having pursued communal religious dualism for an unknown period of time under Ottoman Muslim rule. Living under Ottoman law, which had both practiced its own version of Sharia as civil and penal law and had also honored it as the source of legitimacy for imperial rule, these communities had been aware that their claims for Christianization would boldly transgress the Apostasy Law, an Islamic principle that sanctions renouncing Islam. However, after 1856 edict, when the Sultan was made to abolish the Apostasy Law under immense British pressure, the Ottoman officials were troubled by the news of several crypto-Christian groups appealing for official recognition of their hidden creed. Out of these, two Greek speaking crypto-Christian communities of Trabzon origin gave the longest and the most resilient struggle to be recognized as Christians. For Greek nationalists, these dualist communities symbolized the uprising of an enslaved Greek ethnie. For Ottoman government and later on Turkish nationalists, this was case apostasy-cum treason in the midst of homeland. Positioning itself against nationalist narratives and supporting by documents from Ottoman, British and Greek archives, missionary and other local publications, this paper will first reconstruct the microcosm of Crypto-Christianity as it was experienced by the miners of Trabzon and then explore the dynamics and implications of their struggle for recognition as Christians. This paper attempts to answer what point and why living a crypto-Christian life became neither desirable nor tenable for these dualist communities. In so doing, it offers insights to the complexities of the ethno-religious identities in the pre-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire, and their re-definition with the changing internal and external dynamics and processes of the nineteenth century. The story of crypto Christians demonstrates how blurred the distinctions across religions could be and as such problematizes the assumptions that the identities of Muslims and Christians were always clearly defined and were categorically separated from one another. My research contributes not only by bringing in such muted histories but by also asserting that the Ottoman state transformed itself at the moments and zones of encounters with its societal margins as exemplified by Crypto-Christians.