This paper addresses the construction of nationalist historical narratives in post-Ottoman nation states, a process that was integral to the process of nation building in states that emerged from the Ottoman Empire. Studies of the formation of these narratives in Greece have primarily focused on the period immediately following Greek Independence from the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century. This paper, however, investigates the formation of these narratives following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1922. Specifically this paper – which forms part of a broader dissertation project on the formation of the Benaki Museum in Athens from 1900 – 1940 – does so through an investigation of the Museum’s collection of Ottoman-period Greek folk costumes. This paper demonstrates that the Benaki collection (and the manner in which it was exhibited and disseminated) created a revisionist image of the Ottoman period in Greece, and was part of a broader process that allowed the Ottoman period to be integrated within Greek nationalist historiography. As the paper demonstrates, in the late nineteenth century – when the Greek people formed a significant fraction of the Ottoman Empire’s population – these same costumes had been instrumentalized by the Ottoman government to project an image of the Ottoman state as a harmonious multiethnic entity. (The Greek costumes had been exhibited, most famously, alongside the costumes of other Ottoman peoples, in the Ottoman pavilion in the 1873 Worlds Exposition in Vienna and further disseminated in the Costumes Populaires de la Turquie photographic album.) The paper thus undertakes a thorough comparative study of the Ottoman framing of these costumes (both in exhibitions and publications) and the Benaki Museum’s own framing (evinced in archival guidebooks, photographs, and publications). In doing so, the paper argues that the Benaki Museum undercut the political message underling the Ottoman displays, portraying instead Ottoman-Greeks as part of a single nation, whose existence the museum anachronistically telescoped back into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In demonstrating that the Greek cultural elite was keenly aware of Ottoman precedents, this paper also subverts a basic assumption that underlies most scholarship on modern Greece: that Greek cultural trends found their origin in Europe.