How does Ottoman history figure in the formation of urban space in relation to modern categorizations of identity and national citizenship in contemporary Turkey? In this paper, I engage with this question by focusing on a specific instance of urban place making, one that draws our attention to the temporal horizons of religious and national belonging. In particular, I examine how the urban space of Turkey’s border town of Antakya aligns multiple temporalities and ideologies of governance in the present, and projects the future-oriented imagination of a multi-religious Ottoman past onto the city’s physical, social, and political space. Located at the northeast corner of the Fertile Crescent, Antakya has historically been home to bilingual (Arabic-Turkish) Jewish, Orthodox Christian, and Alawi groups as well as Alevi and Sunni Turks, Armenians, and Kurds. The spatial governance of this demographic diversity has produced a multilayered urban landscape that reflects the uneasy coexistence of architectural styles and urban planning from the late Ottoman, French Mandate, and Turkish Republican periods. In this paper, through an examination of visual, archival, and ethnographic data, I trace the socio-economic and political underpinnings of the urban transformations and fragmentations that Antakya’s old quarter and historical marketplace have gone through since the 19th century. These transformations and fragmentations point to the concrete sites of intermingling between imperial, colonial, and national modes of governing diversity as part of urban place making with significant implications on the identity formation of the city residents. Unsettling the essential divide between Europe and the Middle East, my analysis also demonstrates how the legacy of Ottoman urban planning has been integral to the contemporary experiences of modernity in the region rather than as derivatives, exceptions, or alternative to European frameworks of modernity.