The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the heyday of anti-Mormon melodramas across the U.S. In the diverse body of imagery attached to the Mormons in the American mainstream culture, the depiction of the Mormons as (white) Turks has contextualized some interesting racial and religious constructs of knowledge, which has also received some scholarly attention in recent years (such as M. S. Jones, Performing American Identity, 2009). Yet, the actual Mormon presence in the realms of the Ottoman Sultan has rarely been mentioned, if ever at all, in such popular depictions or has rarely been discussed in monographs that examine the missionary work in the Ottoman Empire. While the Mormon missionary work in the Middle East was limited in scope, focusing on the conversion of the Ottoman Armenians, their efforts in proselytizing the Ottoman subjects open up a set of interesting questions concerning the interactions between the Protestant missionaries and the Mormons, between the Ottoman state and the Mormon missionaries, and between the American diplomatic missions and their attitudes towards the Mormons in the field. To add one more line of complexity to the missionary encounters in the Middle East, this paper will examine the beginnings and subsequent phases of the Mormon mission to the Ottoman Empire by utilizing the archival records from the Ottoman Archives of the Office of the Prime Ministry in Istanbul, Turkey, the local files of the American consulates from the National Archives, Washington D.C., as well as the wide-ranging collections from the Church History Library and Archives in Salt Lake City, UT, the Marriott Library of University of Utah, and the Harold B. Lee Library of Brigham Young University.