The historiography on the ethnic relations in the Ottoman Empire’s eastern provinces in the nineteenth century carries the burden of the later history of the region: ethnic-cleansing, counter-massacres, and its (de-) nationalization. The projection of its later history into the past which is shaped by various nationalist and nation-state bounded perspectives, in many cases obscures idiosyncratic characteristics of the ethnic relations in the region, which are more complex than what our modern concepts of co-existence and multi-culturalism imply. Besides these omnipresent historiographical and ideological obstacles, there is also a problem of sources on the history of the region; the seemingly little use of documentation outside the archives of the Ottoman or other states, limits the researchers’ efforts to reconstruct the history of the region from different perspectives. This paper aims to tackle these problems, and make contribution to the field by introducing and analyzing excerpts from the diary of Simeon of Sasun, an Ottoman Armenian from the region in the mid-nineteenth century. Besides its uniqueness as a part of a self-narrative source that give us hints about the inner world of its author, the texts also throws substantial light on the social world that surrounded him. The fact that Simeon of Sasun was a convert to Protestantism and preached as a native pastor in the same region after having received his early education as an Orthodox priest renders his writings even more valuable and at times biased and controversial. The biases and controversial statements have a value on their own in understanding the mentality of period. The sections of the diary that will be presented in the panel cover the period between 1852 and 1864 with substantial information on his childhood and youth experiences before his conversion to Protestantism under opaque circumstances. In these sections, Simeon of Sasun’s matrix of relations with Orthodox Armenians, Protestants, members of different communities, other missionaries and state officials lead us to rethink about the inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic relations in the region in the mid-nineteenth century, and more mundane reflections of larger transformations of the Ottoman society.