This paper examines the ways in which the Turkish government addresses and attempts to govern youth in the face of growing dissent. In a series of controversial speeches in 2012, the then Prime Minister Erdoğan declared that their goal is to bring up religious youth. The prime minister's declaration garnered a strong reaction from the society. The protests in the Summer of 2013 helped crystallize the governing Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) growing anxieties about controlling young people. During the protests, we witnessed the state officials’ systematic efforts to discredit, criminalize and repress young protestors. This paper investigates not the repressive tools but the ideological ones in the management of youth masses. It looks at high school essay competitions that the government devised in the aftermath of the protests. These competitions focus on important Ottoman military victories such as the Conquest of Istanbul or the Dardanalles Campaign and mobilized students to think and write about the significance of these campaigns and their military leaders. The competitions are followed by extravagant award ceremonies, where students were awarded lavishly with gold coins, vacation vouchers and other big and small gifts. Although these competitions seem to focus on historical themes and in that sense can be read as yet another case of the AKP’s politics of history, the paper argues that there is more to the story in the ways in which the essay competitions also serve as a device to create a discursive field that helped the government rationalize and legitimize its controversial practices concerning urban reconstruction and political transformation. Finally, the paper analyzes the intersections of politics of history and politics of future in governing youth in Turkey.