“They are still plundering the graves of the Armenians!” Bişar murmured clicking his tongue, a middle-aged Kurdish friend, during a debate on the discovery of more mass graves –graves where Kurdish guerillas and civilians who were executed extra-judicially by the security forces in the 1990s are buried. For many people who had spent their childhood in Western Turkey, the Armenian massacres of 1915, and their grave-sites, are not frequently a topic. During my MA fieldwork, I was astonished to see how fresh many Kurds’ memories on the Armenian massacres were in Van, an eastern province of Turkey bordering Iran. Almost a century has passed since 1915, yet the stories and the ruins of the Armenian massacres have not ceased to haunt the collective memory of the Kurds. In this paper I argue the following: 1) My informants overtly transgressed the official denial of genocide with overwhelming expressions of shame and guilt because of their belief in the complicity of their predecessors in the Armenian massacres, 2) historical memory with respects to the Armenian genocide had been radically undone and redone by the PKK movement of the past thirty years, and 3) even in the absence of transmitted stories, the remnants of Armenians figured as mnemonic devices enabling them to imagine the Armenian past of the city of which they did not have a personal recollection. Through the study of a particular locality in which violence of the past bleeds into the violence of the present, this paper makes a contribution to current debates on political violence, memory and materiality in this extremely tumultuous part of the Middle East.