Turkey’s formal EU candidacy and Istanbul’s designation as the 2010 European Capital of Culture have both intensified controversies over urban public memory, democratic consolidation, and civil rights. The Islamic municipality and a corporate secular NGO joined resources to initiate the larger 2010 Cultural Capital of Europe Project, planning to boost historic preservation, gentrification, and tourism with over two million Euros aid from the EU. Simultaneously, Istanbul municipal authorities have both collaborated and collided with local and global NGOs, defamed urban communities, and artists in staging “safe” (non-Kurdish, non-Armenian) ethnic, particularly Rom (“gypsy”), cultural praxis as proof of enduring Islamic/Ottoman tolerance and EU-adaptable, urban social inclusion. In this paper, I examine urban Rom (“gypsy”) performances as contradictory expressions of Turkish political pluralism and global synchronicity in the context of EU harmonization. Urban redevelopment for 2010 has led to forced evictions and increasing impoverishment in some Rom Istanbul neighborhoods (the artistic ghetto of Sulukule) and cultural revitalization with tourism boom in others (Ah?rkap?). To understand the Rom’s simultaneous recruitment and displacement, I will focus on both official and grassroots cultural projects centered on ethnic performance such as the Islamically-motivated demolitions in Sulukule and the volatile collaboration between the secular NGOs and the Islamic municipality for the Istanbul 2010 project. Drawing from fieldwork with Sulukule residents, local and international NGOs, and Islamic government officials, my first goal is to provide the missing ethnographic link in the academic literature on EU-Turkish relations. Second, I plan to causally connect the Islamic and secular management of marginalized (non-devout, ethnic, and sexual) bodies to everyday faultlines of civil society in the context of transnational, particularly UNESCO and EU, interventions.