In Turkey, as in other contexts, national celebrations have been important instruments of political socialization, legitimacy and mobilization. Yet Turkish historians have rarely studied the culture of national celebrations in Republican Turkey, nor have they examined closely the emergence and functioning of that culture in the early decades of the Republic. While historians of the early Republic focused on the more explicitly political “reforms,” celebrations were largely assumed to exist within the separate sphere of folklore despite the very political nature of these celebrations. The few exceptions to this include the works of Arzu Ozturkmen and Kathryn Libal. I agree with Ozturkmen’s suggestion that we study celebrations in the context of the formation of national identities. While reforms initiated by the state were potentially more confrontational and conflictual, national celebrations constituted a less confrontational, and potentially more participatory and inclusionary path of social and cultural change. In this paper I first give an overview of national celebrations in Turkey. Then I turn to 23 April, National Sovereignty and Children’s Day, and 19 May, Youth and Sports Day, and study how 23 April and 19 May were celebrated in the 1930s, what those celebrations meant for those involved, who were included, who were excluded, and how they related to the larger questions of reform, nation building, secularism and modernization. I rely on a wide range of primary sources for this paper including archival sources, mainly from the Prime Minister’s Archives of the Republic in Ankara, and published interviews and interviews I conducted in several towns in Turkey. Newspapers, detailed celebration reports sent from the provinces complete with photographs, and oral historical data provide rich insights into how these special days were celebrated not only in Istanbul and Ankara, but also in the small, distant towns of Anatolia. By focusing on a number of specific instances of celebrations I investigate what the collective experience of these celebrations meant for the organizers, participants and audiences in terms of their social, cultural, and political identities. I argue that these celebrations, along with the education system, were instrumental in the creation of a generation of Turkish citizens in the 1930s with a shared republican national culture.