Panayır Nostalgia: Small-Town Fairs Through Film and Photography

Until recently, panayırs (annual fairs) provided a rare venue for trade, entertainment, and socialization in small towns across Turkey. Films, along with photographs and oral histories, provide a lens through which one can study fairs and their transformations, which in many ways reflect broader social, economic, and cultural changes experienced in the same period. In recent decades, panayırs have been in a gradual but seemingly irreversible decline. Paralleling the decline of panayırs has been an outburst of profound nostalgia, along with the rise of efforts to document and preserve the surviving panayırs. Recent panayır films bear witness to their decline, revealing the nostalgia for the panayırs of the past and the grief for the disappearance of a tradition. In fact, recent panayır films and panayır photography can be seen as very much a part of that (sometimes) nostalgic effort to revive the fairs. Focusing specifically on the multi-episode documentary film Panayır İnsanları and panayır memories collected through oral interviews, this article examines the nostalgia expressed by artists (writers, directors, photographers) for the small town fairs of their childhoods as a symptom of a broader nostalgic mood about panayırs, small town childhoods, and provincial Anatolia.