The last two decades in theatre and performance studies have been marked by a utopian turn, where utopianism is almost exclusively associated with liberatory or progressive visions and goals. General Kâzım Karabekir’s theatre work with children presents an opportunity to review and revise these assumptions. When the Turkish War of Independence started in 1919, General Karabekir, who commanded the troops on the Ottoman Empire’s Eastern front, developed a militarized vocational education project to integrate orphans and other poor children into the workforce. For this project, which he called Gürbüzler Ordusu [The Army of Robust Children], Karabekir recruited six thousand children and transformed Sarıkamış into a children’s town that Ottoman intellectuals like Halide Edib explicitly described as utopian. Karabekir dressed the children like soldiers, fed them with military rations, and made them follow a strict physical exercise regimen based on military training. The Army of Robust Children was part of Karabekir's broader project of the "rehabilitation of the Kurds" and the East. Indeed, many of the children involved were Kurdish or Armenian, but they were all raised as Sunni Muslim and Turkish. Karabekir designed their educational program to eliminate any markers of ethnicity, including language and dialect. To this end, he employed applied education and drama-based pedagogy. The General was particularly fond of musical theatre, which he perceived as a tool that could “discipline the children’s spirits, bodies, and minds together.” He thus wrote and composed several musicals as well as dramatic performances in other genres, which he staged with the children. Studying the theatre as a site where ubiquitous and artistic performances converge, this project analyzes how The Army of Robust Children rehearsed and performed desirable Turkish citizenship, and negotiated the politics of belonging in and through the theatre. Theatre practices shaped these disadvantaged children's everyday performances as well as their visions for the future. Amidst the precarity of the war, their performances also gave hope to Turkish audiences, and helped Karabekir to consolidate his authority. The Army of Robust Children’s performances demonstrate how theatre and performance can motivate us to invest our energies and imaginations in utopian projects that are ambivalent or antagonistic to liberatory or progressive goals. Karabekir's project also reminds us how the tensions between utopian desires and material realities can have drastic consequences for vulnerable subjects—in this case revealed by Sarıkamış's symbolic value, enhanced by the children’s utopian performances, rendering a deadly infrastructure invisible.