The Armenian Protestant community of Istanbul had been operating an informal orphanage through the Gedikpaşa Surp Hovhannes Church since the 1950s, sheltering orphaned and impoverished Armenian children from across Anatolia in the lower floor of the church building. As the numbers grew, the community recognized they needed more than a basement — they needed space, summer air, and a place where children could simply be children. In November 1962, the church leaders registered a piece of forested land in Tuzla in the church's name. The camp that rose on that land was named Armen, and it would educate and shelter some 1,500 children over the 21 years it operated. For the Armenian community of Istanbul — already diminished, already living under the pressures of minority status — the camp represented something beyond summer activities. It was evidence of continuity.

In 1974, Turkish authorities began seizing properties belonging to Christian minority foundations, citing a 1936 law that prohibited minority foundations from acquiring new property. Camp Armen's land was among those taken. The camp closed in 1983. What followed was decades of legal effort — lawsuits for the return of the property, claims for compensation for the structures built on land the community had purchased legally and improved with their own labor. None of it succeeded. The land passed through state hands, was eventually sold, and in 2001 found itself owned by a private businessman who planned to build a house on it. Only when Hrant Dink personally contacted that businessman — telling him the history of the place, that children had worked these grounds, that this land had once sheltered the community's orphaned — did the plan stall. The businessman offered to donate the property back. The law, at that moment, did not allow it.

In April 2015, news emerged that the camp was to be demolished for luxury housing. On the morning of 6 May 2015, demolition equipment arrived. So did the community. Armenian foundations, activists from the Nor Zartonk movement and Kamp Arman Solidarity, journalists, and ordinary Istanbullu citizens formed a cordon. A Change.org petition gathered tens of thousands of signatures. A march was organized. The workers contracted to demolish the orphanage reportedly stopped their machines when they learned what the building was. For 175 days, the resistance held. On the 175th day, the legal owner, Fatih Ulusoy, donated the property to the Gedikpaşa Surp Hovhannes Church. He later said he had not known the history of the camp when he ordered the demolition. The rest of the expropriated land, held by Tuzla Municipality, remained unresolved.

Camp Armen entered Turkish public consciousness as a civil rights cause partly through the weight of the names attached to it. In 2000, the Turkish Human Rights Association published a book based on a 1996 exhibition about the camp — with a foreword by Orhan Pamuk and an afterword by Hrant Dink. Dink's 2007 assassination outside the offices of his newspaper, Agos, transformed the camp into something more charged: a place connected to a man who had been killed for writing about Armenian history in Turkey, who had spent his childhood summers building the very place now at risk of erasure. On the 14th anniversary of Dink's murder, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu announced that Camp Armen would become a youth center — an institution serving the city rather than a single community, though rooted in that community's loss.

The old orphanage building was demolished on 8 April 2017 — not by the developer's crew, but to make way for a new structure built with the community's consent and the city's support. In December 2017, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality changed the site's zoning designation to "social and cultural facility." In January 2021, the city council voted unanimously to approve the redevelopment plan. Earthworks began in 2022. In November 2023, the foundation of the new Camp Armen was laid in a ceremony attended by community members and city officials. The new building will include a dormitory for 100 residents, a cultural center, a library, multi-purpose halls, an auditorium, and a memory center documenting the orphanage's history. Somewhere in that memory center, there will likely be a record of thirty children between the ages of eight and twelve who came here in 1962 and built something that outlasted everything that was done to erase it.