About

Anafen is the nickname for a boy named Yunus Emre Yilmaz, who received the highest score in Turkey's SBS exam, a placement test for middle schoolers, in 2012. A picture of Yilmaz taken for news coverage of the event began spreading on YouTube and Reddit in shitposts in early 2019. In the picture, he is wearing a shirt that says "Anafen." Anafen is a company which owns a series of prep schools in Turkey.

Origin

On July 17th, 2012, Sondakika^[1] posted a story about Yilmaz' winning score in the SBS exams. The story features the picture which would be used in future memes about Yilmaz (shown below).

Spread

On December 29th, 2018, YouTuber EOH posted a video called "anafen slideshow," which was simply the picture appearing over and over. The video gained over 5,000 views (shown below).

On January 5th, Instagram user Allnife posted Mafia City remix video in which Big Chungus transforms into Anafen (shown below). Within eight days, the video gained over 11,500 views.

The same day, parodies appeared on Reddit's /r/TurkeyJerky, including a Mafia City parody post by swandsize that gained over 700 points (shown below, left) and a Big Chungus parody by friggindoge that gained 73 points (shown below, right).

Memes got more popular in May of 2019 as the character began to spread outside of Turkish communities. User yourefiredrigby gained over 1,600 points with a May 5th post to /r/dankmemes (shown below, left). A Drakeposting meme posted by yoretie gained over 150 points (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References