In photography, a negative is an inversion of an image where the light areas are foregrounded in dark, and the dark matter is pushed to the background by being rendered light. In this paper, I ethnographically engage a site in south Turkey in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide as one would read the negative of a photograph, highlighting that which has been actively absented. Reading Antakya from the vantage point of its Armenian and other absentees, I magnify the mundane silences that shape the ordinary in this town. The ‘negative ethnography’ of Antakya that I draw, attempts to re-inscribe its absentees into a narrative of the city. Against the grain of a positivist anthropology that would frame its object of analysis around that which is evident, present, uttered, and said, here I stay and sit with the negative, foregrounding that which has been absented as a result of genocide and co-related atrocities. In engagement with philosophies of negativitiy, as well as histories and ethnographies of erasure, this paper reads Turkey’s contemporary through a ‘negative methodology.’