Attempts to form a modern border between Ottoman and Qajar lands started with the Treaties of Erzurum [1828-1848]. One thing that triggered disagreements between two empires was the application of Tabiiyet-i Osmaniye Kanunnamesi (The Law of Ottoman Nationality, 1869) in majority Kurdish regions near the Persian borderlands to define a common Ottoman citizenship irrespective of religious or ethnic divisions. The gap between plural realities of Kurdish locality and its singular image in the minds of Ottoman bureaucrats complicated the picture even more dramatically: It would not be easy to define who was Ottoman and who was not through reforms and measures produced in Istanbul or Tehran. This paper focuses on the cartographic and discursive formation of Ottoman-Persian boundary and the imposition of Osmanlilik (Ottomanness) upon the nomadic and semi-nomadic Kurdish subjects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that frontier region between two empires is one of the best exemplary points for laying out the contours of the newly emerging modern central state in Ottoman lands. Rather than treating the Ottoman state’s power as already constituted in the mostly Kurdish borderlands, I attempt to look at the production and establishment of state authority in the frontier zone through newly introduced institutions and governmental practices. In this way, the paper explores the ways in which the formation of well-defined border inevitably gained a dynamic feature in relation to the production of external distinction and internal homogeneity as the state actors treated borders as discursive and real barriers within which an ideal Osmanlilik could be spread. Therefore, through close readings of cartographic and discursive meanings attached to the concept of border, this paper provide a discussion for the dialogical relationship among the reification of the Ottoman state on borderlands, the construction of Osmanlilik and the formation of the Ottoman-Persian border in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.