This paper will address a gap in the study of Turkish nationalism, which rarely acknowledges the latter’s resistance against orientalism, less still its relationship with the coloniality of Ottoman rule, and highlight the overlapping and cooperation of orientalist and colonial discourses in the production of the nation’s other. To this end, this paper will consider nationalism, orientalism, and colonialism as historically situated discourses, both on a global scale and in the context of the Turkish nation-state, and focus on the early historical discourse of the latter, commonly known as the Turkish History Thesis, to tease out the ways in which the nation-state constructs those on its margins in temporal and spatial terms. Here, the Turkish History Thesis will be interpreted as a spatiotemporal discourse which is required to fulfill the requirements of the nation-state form and, to use Nandita Sharma’s terms, separate “people in place” from “people out of place” but is continuously challenged by its own Ottoman past as it attempts to conform to the only acceptable categories of the postcolonial world order. To develop this argument, the present paper will return to the foundations of the Turkish History Thesis and explore its earliest and most comprehensive expression in a monumental volume titled “The Outlines of Turkish History,” which was prepared under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s indirect supervision and circulated for the first time in 1931. The analysis of this seminal text will first highlight the ways in which an orientalist gaze grounds European civilization in the Near East while pushing the Orient into the past, constructing a temporally defined tabula rasa in turn. This unresolved competition for space will then be extended to the so-called ethnoreligious minorities of the nation-state, who can challenge the latter on territoriality by laying claim to polities (and thereby histories) older than the history of any Turkish state in Asia Minor. In turn, this problem will be related to the Eurocentric discourse of orientalism and its involvement in the colonial practices of the Ottoman Empire, which will be considered in continuity with the nationalist discourse of the Turkish Republic. Finally, the paper will return to the spatiotemporal construction of the nation’s other and discuss the ways in which colonialism, modernity, and Eurocentrism displace and confine the so-called Oriental or Middle Eastern in a predetermined spatiotemporal framework as the nation-state attempts to displace this gaze by confining its other in the same idea.