AKP government established an arts and culture hegemony that was constructed at the beginning to be an anti-Republican establishment. This stance has changed recently, starting with personal appointments of the AKP government to the head of the State Theatres, especially starting with the failed military coup attempt in 2016. Since then, it has become a common practice for AKP to appoint the Head of the State Theatres, who in return create seasons that cherish conservative playwrights such as Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, or order ‘local and national’ seasons when ‘national unity’ is felt to be under threat by the government, such as after the 2016 military coup attempt. These hints of policy change from complete denial and attempts at closure to hegemony-establishing institutional moves became undeniable in 2021 with a radical initiative for the AKP government. As part of the approaching 100th year anniversaries in 2023, AKP government made it their duty to revise the Atatürk Cultural Center at Taksim Square, enlarged it to endorse a variety of productions, and for the opening of the new Atatürk Cultural Center in 2021, they ordered a new ballet, Yunus Emre, and a new opera, Sinan. For the context of this paper presentation, I plan to give this background and focus on Sinan opera and its performative elements. After the 2021 premiere of Sinan, the libretto of the opera was published by Vakıf Bank Publishing House in 2022, making this one of the very few (if not the first) Turkish-language opera libretto publications in the Republic of Turkey that is accessible to general readership. Moreover, right after the premier of the Sinan opera, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan shared the full recording of the opera in his official YouTube account on the Republic Day of 2022, on October 29. Thanks to being widely documented immediately after its release, I will examine this important case study and its political meaning by both looking into the performance work itself, and also through questioning the political parallels between Atatürk’s own ordering (and personally dramaturging) of the Özsoy opera, widely known as the “first Turkish opera”, which premiered in 1934 for Rıza Shah’s diplomatic visit to Ankara.