This presentation intends to contribute to the studies of the Izmir Fair in particular and commercial gatherings in general in early Republican Turkey. Its main purpose is to discuss how the Izmir Fair shaped the relations between state actors and citizens. As the largest fair of Republican Turkey, it has taken place regularly since 1933. Different segments of Turkish society were integrated into the fair. The preparation for the fair required the participation of various ranks of the bureaucracy, business leaders, and workers from the city center and the surrounding neighborhoods. While the cultural, economic, and political functions of the fair have been the purview of scholarly works in Turkish and English, its role in shaping state-society relations has received little attention. The empirical backbone of this presentation is exhibit catalogs, local newspapers, the periodicals of chambers of commerce, correspondence between local and central officials, and memoirs by visitors. I argue that although the fair occupied an important place in the collective memory of Turkish people both in Izmir and the rest of the country, and the government tried to promote a cohesive image of the Turkish nation through the Izmir Fair, the experience and meaning of the fair varied across different social classes and groups. To show this heterogeneity, I use a three-level analysis. I look at the differences between the experiences of small-scale enterprises and big enterprises, working-class and rich spectators, and top-level politicians and local officials. The Izmir Fair demonstrates how public authority was exercised and how public resources were allocated at the local and national levels. For example, big corporations benefited from the fair and obtained the support of the government more than small and medium-sized enterprises.

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.

Festivals are an important aspect of urban culture all around the world. Festive events are organized in response to certain needs of a community. They offer entertainment for the local population and the visitors. Entertainment and commercial promotion taking place in festive space contributes to economic prosperity and urban development. Religious festivals are no exception to this characteristic of festive culture. Religious festivals have become more important sites for promoting the festival locations and attracted numerous tourists particularly with the emergence of an industry of festivals since the 1990s. This paper examines the connections and negotiations between religious and secular spheres within the context of certain religious festivals in Turkey. It relies on field work completed in Turkey, primary sources, and secondary sources. Among the religious festivals, Konya Festival commemorating Rumi, Aksehir Festival commemorating Nasreddin Hodja, and Hacibektas Festival commemorating Haci Bektas Veli are the oldest and most known ones in Turkey. These festivals were created around the “museumised” mausoleums of these saints and have made it possible to venerate them despite the fact that this old tradition had been abruptly suppressed in Turkey when all the mausoleums were closed to visits and rites of veneration on the mausoleum sites were banned in 1925. The entertainment aspect had been a part of these festivals since their initiation. In Aksehir, donkey races and Nasreddin Hodja riding his donkey backwards during the procession established ambivalent relations between saint veneration and entertainment. Comedic sketches, music concerts and folkloric dances attracted larger audiences with stronger secular expectations. Emergence of consumerism even led Nasreddin Hodja to promote local tourism and be represented as a playful figure with an impish look on his face. In Hacibektas staging Alevi/Bektashi religious-ritual dance, “semah,” as folkloric dance raised a controversy about the nature of staged-semah. Similarly, in Konya, staging Mevlevi ritual dance, “sema,” as a cultural performance blurred the line between saint veneration and touristic promotion of Konya. These festivals have offered valuable opportunities for rediscovery and articulation of marginalized, suppressed identities and for the public demonstration of the suppressed mystic rites and rituals. Meanwhile, they initiated a process of secularization of these religious figures and their traditions and helped economic growth. As such the potential of religious festivals for urban development has underscored the tensions between the religious and secular spheres. This paper looks into this historical process and discuses the negotiations between the sacred and secular spaces.

This paper examines the increasing significance of the commercial fairs as a means of providing capital accumulation and increasing production for the local businessmen, in the case of Balıkesir. The early years of the republic witnessed the protectionist economic policies of the Turkish government which promoted and supported the commercial fairs throughout the country. These fairs were supposed to assist the development of a national and capitalist economy by gathering the producers and businessmen together from all around the country and creating new economic networks, beyond the apparent aim of increasing agricultural production. Besides the fairs on a national and international scale, local fairs (panayırs) gained more importance and were encouraged by both the central government, local governments and local merchants. Furthermore, several new fairs, in almost every district, took place in addition to the already occurring others. The central government facilitated the conditions of the fairs by reducing the rents, giving exemptions from the taxes or providing accommodation facilities or reducing the prices of railway transportation. However, it would be insufficient to explain the rise of the numbers of these local fairs just by a state-led policy. Instead, the role of the local merchants was significant regarding their efforts for seeking convenient channels for improving and developing their economic abilities within the unfavorable conditions of the great depression of the 1930s and Second World War. Accordingly, the increasing number and importance of Balıkesir’s local fairs present deliberate efforts of the local businessmen to enhance their profit by developing the power of the market and increasing the purchasing power of the peasants in particular. On the other hand, the emphasis on the social and entertainment (sefahat) function of the local fairs among the local producers and customers generated a problem for the local merchants since it was perceived as a deviation from the economic benefits of the organization. Drawing on local and national newspapers, government archives, periodicals and municipal records, this paper explores the business mind of the above-mentioned merchants on this very local scale. In this way, it highlights the considerable economic contribution of the local fairs, similar to their national and international counterparts. In addition, this paper reveals the active attempts of the local merchants to ensure the required capital accumulation and the production increase the capitalist development necessitates.