[Mondo Trasho and Esat Cavit Başak] The Manifesto and Resistance of Türkiye’s Counter-Culture

Created by Esat Cavit Başak, from its first issue in 1991, Mondo Trasho etched itself deeply into the collective memory of Turkey’s counter-culture—a beacon that embodied the spirit of fanzine-making and the weight of underground culture. Collages made by hand, pieced together through photocopy and layered imagery, shredded the filters of conventional publishing and turned the zine into a striking visual act of defiance. Its form and content were not merely juxtaposed but fused, crafting a counter-cultural language rooted in irony and critique.

Each issue oscillated wildly from cinema to music, philosophy to absurd news, poetry to collage and drawings: references stretched from punk to Kraftwerk, Cüneyt Arkın to Mustafa Topaloğlu—a tapestry weaving local and global culture into a sardonic identity. Often spun around themes like “Mondo Atropo,” “Mondo Porno,” and “Mondo Arkıno,” the zine’s blend of photocopy, collage, and cut-up techniques fashioned a hybrid, sarcastic, and provocative narrative style. Echoing the DIY ethos, this mode of production effaced the boundary between reader and writer, transforming the zine into a shared field of memory and experience. Through its collages and cut-ups, the zine wove conscious semantic disruptions in text and image—defying firm meanings, standardized readings, and the polished language of the mainstream. Accessible photocopy reproductions broke down intermediaries, enabling a sincere, autonomous circulation, passing hand to hand.

Moreover, each printed copy was an “act of communication,” far removed from polished magazines with licenses and barcodes. The zine circulated physically or as PDFs, maintaining a living archive. The collective participation reshaped not only content creation but inverted the hierarchical reader-writer relationship, fostering belonging and shared agency in the counter-culture. Every reader contribution aligned with Western punk zine traditions, forming a pluralistic communication model and social memory mechanism.

In this way, during the 1990s, when popular culture was still beyond reach, Mondo Trasho became a hub for independent, resistant spirits. Its effects ripple even into later social movements like Gezi, where the street functioned like a living zine, and satire and irony became key expressions of mass resistance. The zine continually disrupted cultural norms and oppressive codes, adding layers to Turkey’s underground and counter-cultural struggles with each issue.

In his later years, Esat Cavit Başak faced legal pressures and trials, emblematic of the challenges to free expression and creative resistance in Türkiye. These struggles only deepened the defiant spirit embodied by Başak and Mondo Trasho, revealing how counter-culture is systematically targeted by state and official institutions.

Today, Mondo Trasho’s PDFs and archive editions still circulate. As Başak said, “the main thing is that the work circulates—the rest is nothing.” It remains a living archive, a voice, a memory. Countless zinesters invoke it as a vital reference in Turkey’s counter-cultural history. From its inception, Mondo Trasho was more than a fanzine—it was a rare embodiment of counter-culture, resistance, plurality, collectivism, and cultural memory. ✪