When the Turkish War of Independence started in 1919, the ongoing wars, massacres, and genocides had resulted in a surge in the number of orphans. General Kâzım Karabekir (1882-1948), who commanded the troops on the Eastern Front, perceived these children both as a pending security threat and potentially utopian subjects who could create a prosperous nation-state. Karabekir thus recruited approximately four thousand children and established what he called “the Army of Robust Children” [Gürbüzler Ordusu]. The Army of Robust Children comprised children of diverse ethnic backgrounds. Nevertheless, they were all raised as Sunni Muslim and Turkish. Karabekir dressed the children like soldiers, fed them with military rations, and made them follow an intense physical exercise regimen based on military training. Combining modern education with vocational, military, and artistic training, Karabekir desired to transform the children into patriotic citizens who were committed to rationalism, science, and industrialism as well as economic nationalism and militarism; wary about the dangers of excessive Westernization; cautious about public health; and had healthy and strong bodies. As the project grew, Karabekir transformed Sarıkamış, a town close to the Armenian border, into a “children’s town,” which the nationalist feminist Halide Edib Adıvar explicitly defined as “utopian.” Theatre and performance figured a crucial role in Karabekir’s project. The children performed the patriotic historical plays, pedagogical monologues, and musicals Karabekir wrote for them. To showcase the children’s bodily transformation, Karabekir also organized a sports festival. These spectacles, where artistic performance amalgamated with the everyday performance of citizenship, were crucial for Karabekir’s negotiations with different publics as well as the performance of his paternal authority. This presentation builds on archival research to analyze how The Army of Robust Children’s performances became a site of militaristic paternal care and discipline. Studying the theatre as a site where ubiquitous and artistic performances converge, I examine how the children rehearsed and performed desirable Turkish citizenship, and how theatre practices shaped their everyday performances and their visions for the future. My research demonstrates how orphans of mixed and ambiguous ethnic backgrounds, who were also threateningly secular and Western in the eyes of conservative Sunni Muslims, used these performances as they precariously negotiated the politics of belonging and how their efforts were prone to failure. Finally, this case study presents an important opportunity to review and revise the tendency in the scholarship to associate utopian performances with liberal or progressive politics.