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The Tokatlian Hotels were founded by Mıgırdiç Tokatlian, an Ottoman citizen of Armenian descent, who moved from Tokat to Istanbul in 1883 and adopted the last name Tokatlıyan meaning "from Tokat".
Many famed individuals such as Leon Trotsky, Josephine Baker, and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk were guests of the hotel. Atatürk considered it his favorite hotel. During the Armenian Genocide, the hotel was vandalized and its windows were broken. It was eventually passed down to the Serbian businessman Nikolai Medovitch in 1919 and after that to the Turkish businessman İbrahim Gültan, who changed the hotel's name to Konak. By the 1950s, due to lack of maintenance, the hotel was run-down and in a deteriorating state, after which the Holy Trinity Armenian Church bought the property and attained ownership.
Mıgırdiç Tokatlıyan eventually settled in Nice, France, where he lived the rest of his life.
