The nationalist discourse frequently employs the allegory of the family to describe the nature of relations and interactions between the nation and its members. The imagining of this larger national family not only ensures a direct link from the body to the polity eliminating any source of commitment in between but also consolidates itself as the exclusive destination of loyalty for its members. With the objective of constructing a new national family in order to produce its citizens as standardized members of the modern national society, the republican regime in Turkey as well aspired to efface connections between the individuals and their kinship, ethnic and religious ties and to eliminate any forms of community-based social structure that challenges its emerging national family. At odds with the arguments that see the individual as straightforwardly associated with the nation state and a national family, this paper asks the question how do the schools hold the community together by maintaining cultural practices. It revisits a space in-between to make sense of the network of relationships clustering around the Armenian schools. Although the main objective of this paper is to unpack the complexity of relations around the Armenian schools by using a family allegory, it further discusses how the concepts of the nation state, community and family interact with each other where power is constituted in a communal field. I use this allegory not only because the space of Armenianness harbors close family ties in its functioning and durability within the particular context of the Armenian schools, but familial-like traits and forms of intimacy pertaining to the nuclear family is also a significant factor of the configuration of the Armenian community when preserving the schools. Depicting communal interactions by the family allegory, I contend that the private sphere and the communal sphere overlap in the operation of the schools and therefore engender a particular practice of governing. In order to unfold this communal space in which familial culture holds sway, I conducted an interview-based ethnography in 6 Armenian schools in Turkey and interviewed more than 120 participants including students, teachers, parents, school administrations and other actors involved with the schools in various ways. My approach allowed me to comprehensively illustrate quotidian intimate relations that are usually reminiscent of a family into the analysis and portray nuances which construct this communal space as a safeguarded internal space.