Donkeys Years is Mangal Media’s new Nasreddin Hoca collection: a slim, risograph-printed volume of parables that were considered too weird, too raunchy, or too politically awkward to comfortably sit next to nationalist bedtime stories. Drawn from Pertev Naili Boratav’s legendary collections and then re-rendered first into contemporary Turkish and then into English, these are literally “the leftovers of the leftovers.”

Between the jokes, the book also traces the life of Boratav: the folklorist who spent decades collecting these stories, only to be hounded as a communist, pushed into exile, and finally see the first edition of his Hoca book pulped before it even reached the shelves. The result is a portrait of a country where folk humour, censorship and authoritarian kitsch are permanently entangled.

Visually, Donkeys Years leans fully into that tension:
flying camels, ghostly ladders into the sky, minarets dissolving into cosmic grain, and a very dignified donkey in a turban – all in gritty risograph textures that make it feel like a bootleg transmission from some parallel Anatolia.