In April 1909, a series of events in the Ottoman Empire unraveled the newfound optimism held by many Kurdish and Syriac Christian leaders following the Young Turk Revolution. This paper focuses on how Kurdish and Syriac Christian intellectuals discussed three of the month’s major events: the Adana Massacres in which upwards of 30,000 Armenian and Syriac Christians were killed, the murder of Hasan Fehmi, chief editor of the anti-CUP periodical Serbestî, and the Ottoman Countercoup, intervention by the Army of Action and subsequent deposition of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. This paper explores the respective impacts of these events on the nascent Kurdish and Syriac Christian nationalist movements by examining the following questions: How these events were comparatively reported both by these communities’ members in Istanbul and in overlapping areas of their central homelands such as Diyarbakir, Mardin and Tur Abdin. How these events were understood regarding the status of Kurds or Syriac Christians within the Ottoman Empire, particularly how Syriac Christians related the Adana Massacres to recent catastrophes. How they exposed attitudes towards the concept of Ottomanism and influenced the trajectories of these nationalist movements in the years between 1909 and 1914. In order to illuminate this period, this paper utilizes the following sources: Ottoman archival documents, contemporary Kurdish and Syriac Christian periodicals, memoirs and correspondence of contemporary Kurdish intellectuals, and correspondence from the archives of the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate. Preliminary research indicates certain trends that are discussed in light of these events, such as increased concern by Kurdish intellectuals regarding marginalization within a deeply entrenched CUP government, or by Syriac Christian lay intellectuals who discuss the need for inter-denominational solidarity for serving victims of the Adana massacres and for preventing subsequent violence. However, through these sources, this paper will delve further into these topics, showing how both purveyors of these nationalist movements understood these events, how they communicated them, as well as how these events and their interpretations were understood by their respective audiences. By comparing the Syriac Christian and Kurdish communities, it will offer a lens to better understand the history of Late Ottoman Southeast Anatolia through how events occurring elsewhere in the empire were related to local conditions and communal history, and will additionally shed light on relations between the Syriac Christian and Kurdish communities during this period.