This paper is an attempt to examine the unpublished memoirs of a late Ottoman and early republican governor, Abdurrahman Pasha (Tanyolaç) as a source for the history of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic. (The original text of the memoirs is in the private library of Abdurrahman Pasha’s family.) Abdurrahman Pasha was both a witness to and an active player in the final stages of the Ottoman Empire. Born and raised in multi-ethnic multi-religious K?rkkilise in 1865 and educated in ?stanbul at Mülkiye, Abdurrahman Pasha served as an Ottoman governor (first as a kaymakam, later as a vali) in a number of towns and cities in Ottoman Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Anatolia under the regimes of Abdülhamid II and the Young Turks through World War One and took retirement as a governor of the Turkish republic. He spent his retirement years under the new regime as an ordinary Turkish citizen (publicly no longer as Abdurrahman Pasha, but as Abdurrahman Tanyolaç, although informally he continued to be known as Abdurrahman Pasha). Dictated in 1947, after living through the formative decades of the republic, these memoirs provide rich insights into the transition from Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, into how Ottomans became Turks, as well as into the relations between Ottoman bureaucrats and the people in the Arab and Kurdish dominated provinces of the Empire. These memoirs offer valuable new information about the operation of the Ottoman state, about life in the provinces, and about ethnic, nationalist, tribal and other conflicts in eastern Anatolia and the Arab provinces. This paper will focus, on the one hand, on the insights Abdurrahman Pasha’s account brings to the debates about “Ottoman orientalism” (I use the term in the sense used by U. Makdisi). On the other hand, I will examine these memoirs for what they tell us about the cultural transformations that took place at the individual and family levels from the late 19th century into 1940s. Memoirs, like oral history, present both rich possibilities and challenges for the historian. What Abdurrahman Pasha remembered, how he remembered it, as well as what he forgot or excluded must have been shaped in part by his republican experiences. As I analyze these memoirs, I will also discuss some of the difficulties involved in using memoirs as a primary source, following the recent scholarship of Leyla Neyzi, Esra Özyürek, Arzu Öztürkmen, and Meltem Türköz.