Scholars of dragomans in the Ottoman Empire have underscored the danger of studying these actors from a national perspective, emphasizing their ‘cosmopolitan’ life styles, multiple identities and specific role as political and cultural intermediaries. While this might stand true for the early modern period, the nineteenth century however offers a less clear cut picture. By then some of the Great Powers had moved towards instituting ‘national’ drogmanat’s, recruiting from among their own nationals (e.g. France, Austria), while others started plans to establish a similar system (e.g. Great Britain). The emergence of nationalism and, closely related to this, a growing contempt towards the supposedly ‘untrustworthy’ Levantines, are some of the reasons that can explain this change. Yet, many other foreign capitulatory states still relied heavily on Ottoman Christians (Greeks, Armenians, Levantines) to fill in the crucial positions of dragomans in their Embassies or Legations. To complicate the matter further, many of these dragomans, especially from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, obtained foreign citizenship. Whereas before these men only had the status of protégé of a European state (and technically still were Ottoman subjects) now they fully escaped Ottoman authority. This paper proposes to look at the case of Belgian diplomatic representation in Istanbul. The drago-mans working for this secondary state were mostly of Greek extraction. As in other European Mis-sions, they also were becoming gradually naturalized. Consequently we find for instance an Armenian-Greek dragoman writing about his loyalty to “la patrie”, referring to his new adoptive state, Belgium. While they clearly tried to position themselves as ‘Belgian’, they were never fully considered as such by their colleagues within the Belgian Legation, nor by their superiors in Brussels; instances of implicit racism are noticeable. The same goes for the Ottoman authorities, which still viewed these ‘Belgian’ dragomans as Ottomans. This paper aims to uncover this seemingly paradoxical dynamic, by taking a closer look at the individual careers of Belgian dragomans for the period 1838-1914. The archives of the Belgian Foreign Ministry (official correspondence, personnel files), supplemented with private papers of Belgian diplomats stationed in Istanbul, provide excellent source materials for this undertaking. By asking how these ‘Belgian’ dragomans negotiated conflicting identities (national, religious, ethnic) and what kind of strategies of self-fashioning they employed (and for what purposes), this paper will address broader questions about cultural hybridity, national belonging and Ottoman-European encounters during the long nineteenth century.