Meeting with the Same Smile After 32 Years: Nasreddin Hodja Cartoon Competition Returns to Akşehir

Meeting with the Same Smile After 32 Years: Nasreddin Hodja Cartoon Competition Returns to Akşehir

A city can sometimes be the home of laughter. Akşehir is precisely such a homeland. The International Nasreddin Hodja Cartoon Competition, launched in 1973 under the leadership of the Akşehir Nasreddin Hodja and Tourism Association, hosted this laughter for years. That is, until the heavy shadow of the September 12, 1980 coup d'état descended upon it as well. This was a joy silenced for eight long years; it was not just a competition, but the silencing of a folk humor, a memory.

After 32 years, we're finally back in Akşehir. And once again, we're at the center of laughter. The Cartoonists Association, Akşehir Municipality, and the Akşehir Nasreddin Hodja and Tourism Association came together again after so many years to hold the awards ceremony and exhibition for this meaningful competition in the shadow of Nasreddin Hodja's tomb, on the land where he lay to rest.

The award-winning artists of this year's 45th annual competition—Pedro Silva from Portugal, Darko Drljevic from Montenegro, Klaus Pitter from Austria, Ivailo Tsvetkov from Bulgaria, Oleg Gutsol from Belarus, and numerous other cartoonists and members of the Cartoonists Association—met with the public in Akşehir. They didn't just win awards; they also painted portraits in cartoon workshops, brought smiles to the streets, and painted hope in children's notebooks.

The Cartoon Exhibition gifted the people of Akşehir, after all these years, not just a "look," but a "seeing with laughter." At the 66th International Nasreddin Hodja Humor Festival, Altan Erkekli played Nasreddin Hodja on stage. One of the most meaningful moments of the ceremony was when Metin Peker, President of the Cartoonists' Association, received the Golden Donkey Award in memory of the competition's return to Akşehir after this long hiatus.

In conversations held throughout the exhibition, foreign guest artists expressed their willingness to be volunteer representatives of the competition in their respective countries. These heartfelt words were a prime example of how the humor emanating from Akşehir has become a universal language.

Now these lands carry new hope... It is said that the International Nasreddin Hodja Cartoon Contest will become not just a competition but an international forum of ideas and smiles in the coming years.

Because we still believe: A cartoon may not change the world, but it does plant the seed of a smile. And that seed has already begun to grow in the soil of Akşehir.