In 1860, sectarian violence erupted throughout Mount Lebanon, Wadi al-Taym, and Damascus, leaving thousands dead and thousands more displaced. While much scholarship on these ḥawādith (or “events,” as they are euphemistically called in Arabic) focuses on the causes and nature of the fighting between Druze and Maronites, less attention is paid to Greek Orthodox Christian survivors of the violence and their displacement to cities like Beirut and beyond. This paper analyzes two eyewitness accounts written by members of the Damascene Orthodox community who fled to Beirut, ultimately settling permanently away from their homes in Damascus. It focuses, in particular, on how these ‘internally displaced’ men understood their experiences as bystanders, refugees, and Arab Ottoman Christians in the midst of a rapidly changing empire, and it considers the nature of memory in the production of migrant knowledge. The first account is a handwritten manuscript entitled Tanahhudāt Sūriyya, written in Beirut by a man named Jibrā’il Mikhā’il Shiḥāda just months after he had fled from his home in Damascus. Little is known about Shihada, although one historian speculates that he was likely an industrialist or artisan, except that he was Orthodox and that he died a few months after finishing his account in 1861. The second account examined here was written by Abraham Arbeely (Ibrāhīm Arbīlī) from March to July 1913 and published as a series in al-Kalima, a New York-based Arabic newspaper edited by Orthodox Bishop Rufa’il Hawāwīnī. Arbeely had witnessed the violence firsthand as a child, fled with his family to Beirut, and ultimately settled in the United States. I show that both authors felt an urgent need to preserve and share their stories, drawing on memory to offer particular audiences a glimpse into the past necessarily bound up in contemporary concerns. Their language and narration, I argue, reveals deeper reflections about politics and society. It also highlights the profound, if often underappreciated, influence of forced migration and displacement on identity formation in the Middle East and beyond.