A popular dance genre rooted in Turkey’s eastern Black Sea region, horon, was choreographed by Cavit ?entürk in the late 1960s to represent the country in international folk dance and music festivals. In comparison to this moment of the dance’s re-construction, my paper examines how horon was collected and codified, and conceived as a national folk genre, for the first time by leading ethnomusicologist Mahmut Rag?p Gazimihal in the early twentieth century. By using Gazimihal’s field notes and notations produced during his trip to the Black Sea in the summer of 1929 and analyzing ?entürk’s choreography, I discuss continuities and discrepancies in the institutionalization of folk dance and music heritage in Turkey. In his field notes, Gazimihal claims that the Black Sea expedition was the first attempt of Turkish ethnomusicologists to collect folk dance as an object of knowledge. State agents and associations helped him gather materials from the cities, villages, and prisons, and invited locals to perform for the researcher. At the same time, in participating Gazimihal’s research, the participants were also actively shaping what would be considered Turkish dance and music. The technologies of the time such as passenger ship lines and cameras facilitated the collection and recording, whereas, time limitations and accidents of fortune defined the scope of the collected material, which is currently disappeared. This paper asks: How were these research processes organized? What were the political, social, and economic infrastructures both enabled and constrained the researchers? What kind of knowledge categories were produced to examine folk genres? How do we trace absence in the archive? Through these questions, the paper aims to critically reconstruct these historical moments on the study of folk dance and music in Turkey and suggests how ethnographic research is used to create categories of authenticity and belonging to the Turkish nation.