Nationalism is, paraphrasing Swyngedouw, a “decidedly geographical project”. Not only does it work in and through a number of geographical scales and their re-articulation, it can easily turn into a panoptical project of surveillance in the Foucauldian sense that operates on a spatial vision of homogeneity, exclusion and opression, and that employs a series of interrelated strategies and techniques to reify this vision. The ’facts on the ground’, ‘cleansed’ territories, homogenized topographies, renamed villages, national monuments, as much as exclusionary citizenship policies and approaches to minorities render hegemonic a certain spatial and temporal order of the nation. This geography of the nation, however, consists of multiple layers of every-day life, institutional arrangements and practices of memory and forgetting, which are inherently contradictory and contested. Rather than creating a unified space and time of the nation, different modes of memory and resistance politics of subverted ethnic groups re-shape the national space as a template of continuous tension, challenge and reprisal. This paper aims to ‘spatialize’ the analysis of nationalism by considering its dark, yet constituent side of exclusion, homogenization and human suffering. Its empirical analysis will focus on the city and province of Urfa, a peripheral border region close to Syria since the establishment of the Turkish nation state. It will look at toponymic strategies, deployed at the local level and directly from the Republican center, in order to transform the cultural geography of Turkey. It will argue that until the 1950s the toponymical transformation of the province of Urfa emerges as that of a gradual cartographic codification, with relatively few instances of renaming especially on the level of sub-district centers, and an orthographic standardization, paralleling the administrative systematization of the province, and that it was only in the late 1960s that a great rupture occurred, transforming the cartographic representation of the former Ottoman province into that of the unified temporal vision of the nation-state.