Until recently annual fairs known as panayırs offered an important venue for trade, entertainment, and socialization in small towns across Turkey. In recent decades panayırs have been in a gradual yet seemingly irreversible process of decline due to factors such as urbanization, improvements in transportation and communications, and the spread of alternative forms of entertainment. One recent study documented that more than two thirds of the small-town fairs known to have existed since the 1920s have disappeared in recent decades. Parallelling the decline of panayırs has been an outburst of profound nostalgia for the fairs, along with the rise of efforts to document and preserve the surviving panayırs. Filmmakers and photographers such as Mehmet Eryılmaz, Serdar Güven and Yusuf Darıyerli have produced a number of documentary films and photography collections in an effort to document the panayır, to draw attention to the decline of the fairs, and to help with their revival and preservation. The past two decades have also witnessed an explosion of amateur documentary videos and photography about small town fairs, many of which are shared through social media and circulate freely on YouTube and similar Internet venues. Taken together, these works provide an enormous volume of visual and ethnographic sources for exploring small town fairs, their twenty-first century remembrances and their ongoing transformations. Relying on both professional and amateur films and photography, and existing scholarship (such as recent theses and Vedat Çalışkan’s works), this paper examines both the recent transformations of the fairs and the motivations of the artists producing panayır films and photography, focusing on the Pehlivanköy fair in Thrace and the Kastamonu fairs in the Black Sea region. The Pehlivanköy fair is among the oldest fairs in Turkey and is the only surviving fair in Thrace, whereas the Kastamonu fairs have only survived in the form of festivals. This paper argues that a coalescence of factors such as the awareness of the panayırs as objects of cultural heritage preservation, heritage tourism, urban nostalgia for childhood panayırs and provincial Anatolia, along with local social and economic factors such as small rural communities’ continuing need for shopping and entertainment, support the persistence of the fairs in one form or other.