The First World War has come to be remembered differently in the collective historical consciousness of the successor states and former communities of the Ottoman Empire. For the Armenians of the Diaspora and the modern republic, in particular, the genocide of 1915 exercises an outsized influence on postwar space and memory. The metanarrative of the genocide looms so prominently that it has come at the expense of all but obscuring the political and social aspects of Ottoman Armenian life upon the eve of World War I. This paper proposes to reconceptualize the Armenians’ experience by examining how they initially responded to the outbreak of the cataclysmic event that was the First World War. As such, it treats Armenians not as a single monolithic unit, but as an active, engaged citizenry in the empire, as individuals and collectives that hailed from diverse political, socio-economic, class, and ethno-confessional backgrounds, and thus demonstrates the intracommunal cleavages and worldviews that distinguished, for example, Armenian Revolutionary Federation party members from unaffiliated Armenian newspaper editors. In other words, this proposition overcomes deterministic understandings of ethnicity to elaborate on a new dynamic of empire, identity, and the making of political communities. By evaluating a wide range of memoirs, diaries, letters, periodicals, and archival documents, it focuses on the string events following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in June 1914 and concluding with the Ottoman bombardment of Russian naval installations that October. It traces the sites of interaction and lived experiences of Ottoman Armenian journalists, conscripts, school instructors, writers, and deputies of parliament to explore their hopes, fears, and expectations and what anxieties and ambitions they underlay. A careful study of these various mediums expressed in both the public and private spheres reveal competing, though not always mutually exclusive, visions of the future imperial realm. And what the Armenians foresaw in the event of their empire’s eventual entry into the war produced multiple conceptions and articulations of belonging.