Fairs (panayırs) have served an important function in meeting the shopping and entertainment needs of small town and village populations in many parts of Turkey throughout the twentieth century. While the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s marked the golden age of the panayırs, fairs entered a period of what appears to be an irreversible decline in the 1980s, as a result of developments such as improvements in transportation, the decline of rural populations due to continuing immigration to the cities, and the rise of new forms of entertainment such as television. About two thirds of the known panayırs have disappeared in recent decades, with only around 70 fairs surviving to this day. As the decline of the panayırs accelerated in the past two decades, so has the nostalgia for the panayır, alongside a desire and various efforts to preserve them, either as panayırs or in other forms such as festivals. Drawing on oral histories, newspapers, documentary films, and the emerging scholarship on the panayır including the small number of recent theses and dissertations, this paper examines the Kastamonu panayırs as a case study to understand the social life of small town panayırs from the 1950s into their disappearance or transformation since the 1980s. The first part of the paper will focus on the memories of the panayırs as revealed in oral histories with the middle-aged and older (current or former) residents of Kastamonu province with a view to: a. understand the social, cultural and economic function of the panayırs for the local populations, and b. understand and reflect on the panayır nostalgia revealed in the memories of panayırs experienced in childhood and youth. The second part of the paper will focus on the efforts in the province to preserve the panayır in some form or other, examining the successful transformation of the Taşköprü panayırı into an international Garlic and Culture Festival and the more recent attempts in smaller districts of Kastamonu to revive small town fairs, which came to a temporary halt in 2020 and 2021 due to the Covid pandemic. This paper offers a rare opportunity to hear local remembrances of a phenomenon that are about to be erased from memory along with the disappearance of the panayırs. It also discusses future prospects of the panayırs as it reflects on what lessons can be learnt from the successful transformation of the Taşköprü panayırı into a festival.