This paper examines the legacies of military tribunals that took place in Istanbul in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide. After the Allied powers occupied the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, in 1918, military tribunals were organized under Ottoman law to try perpetrators of crimes committed against the Armenian population. While these trials (which lasted until 1920) established an early archive of genocide, the incomplete and fragmentary status of the evidentiary archive remains to be examined as a means of redefining “archive” as an affective and mnemonic source that carries historiographic significance in the present. By rereading legal fragments from the 1918-20 tribunals, this paper uncovers a post-Ottoman imaginary in which ethnic cleansing and genocide are centrally located.