Armenians and Jews experienced the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of successor nation states, and the violence inherent to this process, alongside one another. Their shared experiences of this transformation were concentrated in Istanbul, particularly in the districts of Balat, Ortaköy, and Galata, as this paper will demonstrate. Examining Armenian life and Jewish in these three districts elucidates the varied paths of the transformation enacted by the modernizing empire: Balat witnessed the effects of industrialization on workers, Ortaköy the interaction between imperial governance and missionary influence, and Galata the devastating transformations experienced amidst the concentration of capital. Using a digital map of Armenian and Jewish churches, synagogues, schools, cemeteries, hospitals and orphanages, this paper explores how these groups experienced, to different extents, the violence of massacre, war, genocide, and nation-state formation alongside one another, while also persisting in the activities that sustain everyday life such as selling bread, attending school, and celebrating holy days. This paper places Istanbul’s built environment that has survived the past century, historical maps, and memoirs of childhoods spent in these neighborhoods in conversation with one another in order to draw out everyday movements--market transactions, transportation routes, school commutes, bathing rituals, youth competitions, neighborly visits... These movements and observations in turn reveal the fluid identities inhabiting these neighborhoods during this period. Understanding these groups in relation to one another and tracing how they experienced everyday interaction, wartime precarity, and state violence alongside one another in the same time and place reveals the multiplicity of identities of people inhabiting the imperial center; the contradictory ways in which they were targeted by and implicated in regimes of violence; and the competing memories that emerged in the aftermath of this transition.