“...(O)ur Arab Kalfa, Zeynep Hanim, for whom we searched far and wide suffering a thousand hardships just to give our home that taste of the old world” says Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar in his prominent novel, the Time Regulation Institute. He also adds the point of surprise to the hardship he endured in finding Zeynep Hanim in 1954 in Istanbul, as it would not have been the case in his childhood when “there were so many blacks in Istanbul.  Besides the quantitative comparison he made for the number of black people in Turkey “the taste of the old world” was actually a general perception regarding the presence of black people from the onset of the Republic. After the ambiguous treatment of the enslaved people in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the new Turkish state had initiated a variety of steps to dissolve the institution of slavery and slavery-like practices in 1926 and 1930, respectively. This paper aims to lay out a discussion on the ways in which early Turkish Republic dealt with the legacy of African slavery that was inherited from the imperial past. It argues that drawing the boundaries of Turkishness was deemed necessary for the early Republic in a way to disown the immediate imperial past and constitute its own political legacy. In such an official framework which was deeply invested in drawing the racial contours of citizenship, the descendants of enslaved Africans now citizens of the modern state, had to be rendered invisible. Relying upon parliamentary debates on slavery and the lawsuits involved African descended people as well as articles from the newspapers in early republican Turkey, this paper explores the ways in which blackness and the practice of slavery were transmitted into the nation- state setting. Finally, it argues that carrying the imprint of slavery, blackness was framed within the imperial imaginary thereby the black citizens of the nation-state, were turned into the reminders of the imperial past.