This paper examines how Turkish retirees make lives for themselves in one of the most contradictory places of the Turkish state: a state-run retirement home for independent retirees. Only three such institutions exist, and they present a challenging puzzle to residents, even as the private sphere is starting to see the development of similar facilities. Although aging is often said in Turkey as being a fundamentally private family affair, it is shaped by state programs and projects in many ways. Most state discussions on aging concern the poor and destitute, and many in Turkey associate state activity with respect to aging specifically with those populations. Many younger people say that they could never see their parents in any kind of retirement home, out of shame and love; older people in them are aware that most huzurevleri (rest homes) serve those without the material and especially the social means to live elsewhere. A very few insitutions house civil servant retirees and in them one sees state intervention in creating a specifically middle, or even middle-upper, class of citizen whose class status is confirmed most strongly in leisure and consumption. In these institutions, as well, tensions between a “Father State” and family-based paternal and maternal status and practices are highlighted. Private institutions, and especially the new ones focusing on the wealthy, present more sharply the contradictions of a material poverty combined with social poverty, and a high-end leisure available only to those with considerable wealth. This paper draws upon research in one of the state retirement homes, where retirees live model lives of middle-classness in a hill-top facility that can look, to its residents and visitors, like a luxury hotel, a kind of “site” (or housing development, after the French cité), an urban neighborhood, a state residential compound, and a hospital or nursing home. Residents navigated the meaning of fulfilled lives, sometimes claiming and sometimes denying them, through activities, reflections on their pasts, and relationships with children near and far. Staff and residents tried to make sense of the contradictions the place posed by living a rewarding life in a place with a hospital for the gravely ill; living in a huzurevi geared towards producing middle-classness; maintaining autonomy and relations with children while in a subsidized facility with provided care; recreating active parenting in a context of state dependency; and sustaining local social and artistic creativity.