In Ottoman studies scholars have prevailingly utilized petitions as a source to identify the experiences and social history of subaltern groups. I use petitions to decode the cultural world of locals in the Ottoman eastern provinces. The history and voices of this region have not entered Ottoman historiography. Furthermore, despite the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional setting of Eastern Anatolia in the nineteenth-century, Kurdish and Armenian insular national historiographies have dominated the field. To break out of a history of difference I examine aspects that connected the various ethno-confessional communities. I use representation as an analytical tool in reading Ottoman and Armenian petitions sent from the eastern provinces of Van and Erzurum to the Armenian Patriarchate and the Sublime Porte in Istanbul. With such an analysis I point out the shared discursive strategies with which locals contested their cultural boundaries. The proposed paper will examine petitions that particularly deal with marriage and argue that in the Ottoman Empire between the 1840s and 1870s marriage provided a space in which boundaries of gender, communal customs and identities were negotiated. Crossing such socio-cultural boundaries signified contesting positions of power. Singling out phrases and concepts that repeat throughout these petitions I delineate patterns in the language of the petitioners. Linking the language appearing in texts produced across ethno-confessional divisions I will ask how the cultural worlds of communities that thus far historians have presented to be unconnected, intertwined. I ask what connected the ethno-confessional communities that have overwhelmingly been represented as different both in twentieth-century historiography and nineteenth-century sources? How common socio-political processes and power dynamics engendered particular discourses of difference? The proposed study will contribute to Ottoman studies in that it will provide a view of popular culture in the Ottoman Empire, as opposed to elite culture, which has dominated the academic field.