Panayır Memories (November, 2015)

In August, the ten-day-long panayır was set up behind the High School, on the broad open space stretching out toward the Ankara-Istanbul highway. The sounds of it came in through the open windows of our house, a few kilometers away. Those panayır sounds, like the buzzing of a mosquito, rising and falling with the wind, those exciting, complex, mystical sounds. The loudspeakers making their announcements until midnight, the songs, the mystical sounds called an invitation to the panayır and we couldn’t wait to be there the next day. In the afternoon, with my friends from school and the neighborhood, I’d run, excited to discover everything in the panayır, with the little spending money I’d managed to get from my mother. Too bad, my money was quickly spent, only sufficient for a few amusements. Mostly we wandered around the fairgrounds with our hands in our pockets.

This formerly cultivated field was uneven and rough. We’d step in a hole, and there was always a danger that we’d fall or sprain an ankle. As it got darker, and the widely spaced, dim electric lights made the holes even harder to see, it became even harder to walk. The most heavily trampled, and thus the most level ground was the lunapark area.

In the countryside, in a time when television had yet to enter our lives, and when newspapers and magazines in color had yet to become widespread, a fair meant a rare excitement. It meant shopping for new and interesting goods. Everything from household goods to clothing, farming tools and machinery, was spread out like a fan before the fairgoers. And, of course, it meant entertainments. Everyone from seven to seventy was drawn to the fair, from near and far. The vendors worked to draw the attention of potential customers by putting on various spectacles. I think it was the summer of 1970; on a starry night of the fair, on a small portable cinema screen set up in one of the stalls, I watched a black-and-white film of American astronauts first landing on the moon. I still remember the clicking of the projector’s spinning reels as the year-old scenes of mankind’s first steps on the moon played out on the screen before us while we watched in rapt silence.

For us kids, the lunapark was heaven on earth. The swinging gondola was, for a kid like me who thought nothing of climbing to the top of a tree, just a simple swing. But with a bit of skill you could swing that little gondola, connected to an overhead bar by a couple of iron rods, almost a full 360 degrees. Two people put their feet at either end of the gondola, and with the power of our knees and the strength of our bodies, we’d swing it, hurling it, screaming, higher each time, ever higher.

The Ferris Wheel is one of the symbols of the fair. In those days it reached higher than the tallest building in the town, and you experienced a bird’s-eye view of the fairgrounds and the town. At night, it felt like you could touch the stars. When the Ferris Wheel stopped to take on new passengers, the cars swung for a few seconds from the sudden stop, and those on top felt a touch of fear of remaining hanging in the sky, and gripped the bars of the car tightly. Girls would hold on to one another as they waited to return to the ground.

The Caterpillar (vugi-vugi) was made up of cars that went around on a circle on undulating rails. Like the Ferris Wheel, families could ride in the same car together. When the Caterpillar sped up, with every rapid drop I felt a sweet emptiness in my groin, a sensation like I had to pee.

The circular swings are one of the important symbols of the fair. Flying in the air over the crowds in a chair hanging by long chains from high above, sensing the...