Popularized after the 9/11 attacks, Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” has marked political debates on the Middle East and Islam in the new millenium, and informed institutional attempts to offer an antidote, such as country and regional branding initiatives facilitated by the World Economic Forum, or the United Nations’ Alliance of Civilizations initiative. Turkey was at the heart of these initiatives, and government officials cooperated with brand image consultants to rebrand Turkey, advertised as a bridge between civilizations. Neo-Ottomanism increasingly grew as a project projecting an “authentic” image, with the Ottoman Empire depicted as a great model of the rule of Islam, where multi-confessional groups co-existed. Within this framework, AKP officials appear to have anachronistically rediscovered “liberal multiculturalism” as a history of “tolerance” in the Ottoman past, and used this notion to demonstrate a positive aspect of Ottomans configured as natural leaders of Islamic heritage. While neo-Ottomanism already existed as a political thought and ideology, this kind of interpretation became more salient especially in the contemporary context. Recently, liberal claims of neo-Ottomanism are abandoned to transnationally promote Islamic civilizationism, which coincides with the rise of white supremacist civilizationism in Europe and beyond. Responding to these dynamics, recent scholarship engaged the notion of civilization critically, while others proposed “civilization” as a useful category of analysis. My presentation is situated against this backdrop and focuses on the interwar-era Turkish historical and intellectual narratives on “Civilization” and their translation to material-culture sites. Rather than considering civilization as an analytical lens, which I argue is a methodological question, I examine different practices revolving around this notion and identify the broader implications of “civilization” accordingly. Specifically for this presentation, I combine textual and visual culture analysis with archival research, and examine the Turkish participation to the 1939 New York World Fair, the tropes deployed in this process, and situate this participation within a broader context. The first World Exhibition that the Turkish government participated after the declaration of the Republic, the Turkish partaking in the 1939 World Fair crystallizes how narratives of Civilization and nation are intertwined. Further, while promoting commodity culture, the World Exhibition sites offer earlier forms of country branding initiatives with civilizationist undertones. Drawing from this research, I contend that contemporary narratives of civilization extract concepts and mechanisms from earlier parochial nationalist projects (including but not confined to Turkey), and feeding them into the larger narratives of civilizationism taking hold today.