The Tenth Anniversary celebrations of the Turkish Republic (1933), one of the largest public gatherings in Turkish history, had a nearly limitless creativity to invent, to adapt, to import, to convert and to nationalize any symbol. The celebrations acted as a “rite of passage” in mass politics, staging the transition from a multiethnic empire to a nation state. Although various primary sources exist, the Tenth Anniversary celebrations are still an understudied phenomenon in Turkish historiography. Indeed, these three days of celebration offer one of the best case studies to understand the state’s control over its subjects and the political discourse used in the making of the “ideal Turkish citizen.” In this study my aim is twofold. On the one hand, I observe the state’s ideology and iconography by scrutinizing the Tenth Anniversary celebrations (1933) per se, and on the other, I examine the reception of these celebrations by the children of different social and ethnic classes via observing a number memories of the celebrations, narrated for an oral history project in 1998. In order to understand the nationalist iconography used by the early republican politicians, and identify the invented, imported and adopted symbols used both for the Turkification of non-Muslims and the nationalization of Islam, I use a number of sources, such as newspapers (Cumhuriyet, Aksam, Yeni Asir), Journals of People’s Houses, Tenth Anniversary publications, governmental records, and the “Guideline for the Celebrations of the Tenth Anniversary” (1933). While these accounts display the state’s efforts to Turkify and homogenize different ethnic and social groups ideologically, the oral narratives on the celebrations (narrated in 1998) show the failure of this project to eliminate cultural and political diversity between various social and ethnic classes. By contrast, they demonstrate that the visual iconography used in the celebrations was indeed very influential over the masses, illustrating the success of materialistic aspects of the celebrations, specifically Kemalist iconography and various national symbols used in the celebrations. In sum, by scrutinizing both the officially-produced accounts of the celebrations and children’s narratives of the very same event, this study aims to examine the ways in which different narratives and personal experiences of the Tenth Anniversary celebrations depict state-society relations in 1930s and afterwards.