The Pangaltı Armenian Cemetery grew over centuries in the Pangaltı quarter, close to the cosmopolitan Pera district where much of Istanbul's non-Muslim population lived. It was enlarged in 1780 and enclosed by a wall in 1853, which gave it the character of a formal, protected space. In 1865, a cholera outbreak in the neighboring Pera district led the Ottoman government to ban further burials here, redirecting the community to the Şişli Armenian Cemetery. From that point, Pangaltı became a place of memory rather than ongoing interment — a ground already full, already holding the dead of several generations. It belonged to the Surp Agop Armenian Hospital, and through it, to the Armenian community of Constantinople.

In the 1930s, the Turkish government's modernization plans for Istanbul reached the Pangaltı quarter. The cemetery was demolished. In 1939, its marble tombstones were sold. The grounds were redistributed: Taksim Gezi Park was laid out here, along with parts of what became Eminönü Square — both designed by the French city planner Henri Prost. The Divan Hotel, the Istanbul Hilton, the Hyatt Regency, and the TRT Radio Buildings were constructed on or adjacent to the former cemetery land over the following decades. The graves themselves, and whatever lay in them, were not preserved or relocated. The Armenian community lost not only the land but the physical markers by which the dead are remembered — the named stones that tell a family where to stand.

Among the accounts that have emerged over the decades, one detail recurs: that the marble tombstones from the Pangaltı cemetery were not simply discarded but put to use. Stones bearing Armenian names and inscriptions are reported to have been incorporated as building material in various Istanbul construction projects of the era, including the Taksim Stadium. This reuse of funerary markers as construction material — whatever the intent behind it — was experienced by the Armenian community as a particular form of desecration, the names of the dead pressed into walls and foundations, rendered illegible and anonymous.

In 1932, before the demolition was complete, Mesrob Naroyan, the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, filed a lawsuit seeking the return of the cemetery property to the community. The Patriarchate acknowledged that it lacked formal legal title to the land — a consequence of the institutional disruptions that the Armenian community had suffered in the preceding decades — but argued that it had legitimate standing to represent the community's interest in the property. A commission found the Patriarch's claims groundless. Title remained with the Istanbul municipality and private third-party owners. The graves of the community's dead, and the land holding them, did not return. What stands above them now offers no acknowledgment of what was there before.