Ottoman historiography portrays nineteenth century reform as a clash between top-down reforming bureaucrats in the imperial center, Istanbul, and provincial powerbrokers. It also asserts that these reform projects, collectively known as the Tanzimat, failed in their quest to promote a sense of Ottomanism among the empire’s non-Muslims. Instead, the argument goes, reform internal to those communities facilitated the development of nationalism and secessionism. By focusing on the clash between two Armenian priests in the empire’s eastern provinces, Mkrtich Khrimian and Boghos Melikian, my paper revisits these assumptions. Following Karen Barkey’s use of Ronald Burt’s theorization of structural holes to explain the conceptual category of empire in the Ottoman case, I posit the reform projects encouraged the bridging of these holes. Doing so required the use of individuals equipped not only with the authority of the central government, but also an intimate understanding of the periphery. Local knowledge, therefore, constituted an important part of the construction of networks between center and periphery. Melikian and Khrimian each possessed such local knowledge. The former used it either to thwart reform, or exploit to his advantage, while the latter deployed it to further the reform project and policies of centralization. Their struggle, however, reveals the multi-layered and intertwined nature of politics, not only between center and periphery, but also how they crossed social, ethnic, and religious lines. How these two priests managed to situate themselves in these networks determined the extent to which policies would be implemented. Their battle, however, was confined largely to leadership over the Armenian Church in an eastern province. This paper, therefore, shows how a study of Armenian religious institutions may be used as a lens for understanding Ottoman reform. While this paper does reference some Ottoman state documents, it is based mostly on published and archival Armenian documents. Unthinkable at the official level, Armenian sources do not shy away from implicating or criticizing political leaders. Set in their Ottoman context, these materials provide a new body of evidence for Ottoman history.