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A Century of Manele: a Sonic Excavation of Romania’s Most Popular Genre

A Century of Manele: a Sonic Excavation of Romania’s Most Popular Genre

November 9, 2025•15-17 minutes read

Written by:

Shaun Williams

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Introduction

In the decades following Romania’s 1989 revolution, the Romanian-Romani ethno-pop genre manele has drawn enormous attention as both a lightning rod for controversy and a frequent target of racist and classist criticism. The fierce debates surrounding this post-Ottoman belly dance music—whose lyrics are relatively tame compared to many Western imports—reflected longstanding anxieties about Romania’s position between European and “Balkan” cultures. As many observers have pointed out, the moral panic that accompanied manele’s rise to popularity was less about the music itself than about its performers, their lifestyles and the values they extolled.1

For younger generations of manele fans, however, listening to the genre is no longer a subversive act—gone are the days of “maneliști vs rockers”. Today, manele (from the singular manea) are just another flavor of pop music that’s catchy and fun to dance to—and that frequently tops the Romanian Spotify charts. For some, the genre has become a conduit for “ironic” participation in a once-maligned subculture; for others, a throwback to the block parties of the 1990s and early 2000s. Meanwhile, superstar artists whose encroachment into mainstream (non-Romani) spaces once sparked scandal after scandal have lost their edge; they and their audience have grown older, and their music has settled into the warm, safe confines of nostalgia. These days, Florin Salam can be spotted performing his once “crazy” hits for Gen Z festivalgoers or joined by his children at Berăria H before a multigenerational crowd that will be home by bedtime.

But the story of the manea begins long before its association with belly dancing and moral panics. Over the past 150 years, the term has been used in Romania to describe a song form, a rhythm, a dance—and eventually an entire genre freighted with notions of race and class. This unlikely journey reveals music’s ability to bend and adapt to changing social worlds, to disappear and resurface, stripped of old meanings and saddled with new ones. Through a listening tour of the first century of recorded manele, we can begin to understand what this music once was, and how it became what it is today.
“Across a century of reinvention, the manea has mediated Romania’s shifting boundaries between East and West, majority and minority, center and margin, continually adapting to new worlds and new meanings.”

Dual origins

“The Gypsies played manele with feverish abandon, the rouged ladies sighed, and the boyars sat on carpets drinking vodka from the shoes of their lovers, hurling their fezzes into the air and kissing the lăutari”;2
This nostalgic vignette of a party among rural noblemen in Ottoman-era Moldova published in 1852 by poet Alecu Russo represents the earliest known reference to the manea in Romanian literature. Russo would revisit the imagined scene in his 1855 Amintiri (Memories), specifying that the Romani lăutari performed “sweet manele, comforting manele, and painful, heartbreaking manele”.3 Over the next seventy years, manele are frequently evoked in the Romanian press and literature alongside fezzes, turbans, hookahs, and rugs as a symbol of the Orient—whether a romanticized past or an exoticized present.

The manea enjoyed by Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians, and boyars alike is portrayed as a “Turkish song expressing melancholy and love”4—“long and plaintive”5, “monotonous”6, “soft and broad”7 “its elongated notes more a lament than a melody”8. This manea bears little resemblance to the one known today: there is no mention of belly dancing, drums, or even rhythm itself. It was not a dance, but a kind of cântec de jale—a song of lamentation whose lines often began with the exclamation “Of!”, much like “Aman!” in Greek and Turkish folk song. For some, this manea was emblematic of a shared post-Ottoman heritage linking Romania with its Balkan neighbors. In 1931, the poet and cultural official Emanoil Bucuța recalled a Turkish diplomat in Bucharest who, upon hearing a lăutar’s mournful tune, recognized it as an Anatolian melody:
“Our old song was nothing more than a manea that had wandered across the Danube in a time when there were no border posts to halt it.”9

The word manea—and, it seems, the song form referenced in 19th century Romania, comes from the Turkish mânî (plural mânîler), a widespread form of folk poetry usually comprised of four-line stanzas in an AABA rhyme scheme. Mânîler are poems recited or sung in everyday life—from work poems and vendor’s cries to love poems and songs of longing. For example:
İreyhan eker misin
Bal ile şeker misin
Kız ben seni alırım
Kahrımı çeker misin10
Do you sow sweet basil bright,
Are you honey, pure delight?
Girl, I’ll take you for my own
Will you love me through my plight?
Meanwhile, historical sources suggest that the Romanian manea had four lines in an AABB rhyme scheme. The earliest transcription of such a manea appears in folklorist Gheorghe Dem Teodorescu’s Poesii Populare Române (Romanian Folk Poems, 1885), transcribed from a puppet show in which two Bucharest street vendors quarrel comically:
Iaurgiulŭ: Turcu estî, mă, și de unde vii?
Bragagiulŭ: (cântat pe aria unei manele)
Ah, aman, aman !
De la Giurgiu viŭ,
turcesce nu sciŭ;
para’n pungă iok,
mâncare de locŭ…11
Yogurt vendor: You’re a Turk, eh, and where are you from?
Braga [fermented drink] vendor: (sung to the tune of a manea)
Ah, aman, aman!
From Giurgiu I come,
I know not the Turkish tongue;
In my bag I haven’t a penny,
Nor food have I any.
No known recordings of these early sung manele exist, though an example of modern-day sung Turkish mânîler can be found in Ramazan mânisi—songs performed in the streets during Ramadan to wake observers for the pre-dawn meal.12 Here, the drum serves not as rhythmic accompaniment but rather announces the singer’s presence and punctuates the stanzas of the mânî.

How, then, did the manea become associated with the belly dance rhythm we know today? As the older, non-metered vocal manea faded from memory at the end of the nineteenth century, another Ottoman-inspired form was gaining popularity: the turcească (“Turkish”)—a 4/4 rhythm with various forms equivalent to the Turkish düyek13, the Yiddish terkisher, and the Turkish sofyan. By the turn of the twentieth century, the word manea had become so emblematic of Turkish folksong in the Romanian popular imagination that it was applied to pieces with the turcească rhythm as well. Whether this was a misunderstanding, a product of the “folk process,” or clever marketing by musicians trading on the exotic allure of a foreign word, we will never know.
The earliest known manele recordings were thus lively dance tunes rather than free-flowing laments, driven more often by the terkisher rhythm than the düyek familiar today. The first of these, a Gramophone disc entitled “Maneaua Turcească” (“The Turkish Manea”), was recorded in 1905 by the military band of Bucharest’s Mihai Viteazu 6th Infantry Regiment. The first half of the track is a turcească built on a sparse terkisher rhythm with a march-like bridge.


Two other early manele sides also entitled “Turkish Manea” were recorded in 1911-1912 by the mysterious M. Parușeff, a performer of the “oriental harmonium”—a portable air-powered organ that is still used in Indian classical music today. The first of Parușeff’s manele begins with a free rhythm improvisation or taksim over a drone, followed by a melody in 4/4 with sparse accompaniment.


This same melody was recorded in New York in 1916 by Romanian-Jewish cimbalom virtuoso Joseph Moskowitz (b. 1879, Galați) as “Chasen Senem”, this time played over a terkisher rhythm.

The B-side of Parușeff’s disc, “Manea Turcească No.2” is a harmonium solo version of the 19th-Century pan-Balkan hit “Kâtibim” (“My clerk”), better known as “Üsküdar'a Gider İken” (“While going to Üsküdar”). Originating during the Crimean War in the mid-19th century, “Kâtibim” is arguably the most covered Ottoman-era melody, inspiring countless interpretations from Saint-Saëns to Eartha Kitt, and even a documentary film. Like Parușeff’s A-side, this is another melody that was often performed with a terkisher rhythm at the time, as in Joseph Moskowitz’s “Medley of Turkish Melodies” (1916) or klezmer clarinettist Naftule Brandwein’s “Der Terk in America” (1924).

A third Romanian gramophone record represents one of the earliest known recordings of a lăutar ensemble performing a rhythmic manea.14 Recorded in 1928 by clarinettist Vasile Constantin accompanied by Ștefan Bugeanu and Petrică Țapu on the button accordion (armonica), Aman Doctor was another pan-Balkan hit of the early 20th century—a kind of Ottoman blues in which the singer pleads with a doctor to cure his/her sorrow.


Mr. Constantin and Mr. Bugeanu. Source: “În fața microfonului”, 1931.
Mr. Constantin and Mr. Bugeanu. Source: “În fața microfonului”, 1931.
Bugeanu, Țapu and Constantin’s instrumental rendition of Aman Doctor differs from its Turkish and Greek antecedents in that, like other early Romanian manele recordings, it is played with a rhythmic pulse that is closer to the Yiddish terkisher than the Turkish düyek.

Meanwhile, the sofyan form of turcească existed in parallel to the older terkisher and ascendant düyek, appearing on Maria Tănase’s 1954 interpretation of Anton Pann’s “Până când nu te iubeam” and a 1963 archival recording of rural lăutar fiddler Alexandru Cercel, bearing the familiar title Maneaua turcească (“The Turkish Manea”).


These examples demonstrate that by the early 20th century, the word manea was already associated with a rhythmic musical genre, but one that was indexical of Turkish culture or an imagined “Orient” rather than Romani culture. My research suggests that the key to understanding the rise in popularity of the manea as a dance within Roma communities over the past century lies in its association with one particular melody that spread like wildfire beginning in the 1950s.
A “Gypsy folk song and dance ensemble” from Dudești, Bucharest, 1956. Source: ANF.
A “Gypsy folk song and dance ensemble” from Dudești, Bucharest, 1956. Source: ANF.

The Romani manea as a subversive phenomenon

After the Communists came to power in 1947, cultural policy was reorganised along Soviet lines, emphasising collectivisation, industrialisation, and ideological control of the arts. During the early years under Gheorghiu-Dej, Romani culture was not explicitly banned but was largely ignored by the state, aside from a few short-lived amateur “Gypsy folk song and dance” ensembles modelled on Soviet prototypes that existed in the 1950s.

As folklore became a propaganda tool, Romani musicians were absorbed into the state-sanctioned genre of muzică populară, their traditions reframed as ethnically “Romanian.” After Nicolae Ceaușescu’s ascent to power in 1965, this evolved into a program of nationalist homogenization and cultural erasure as Roma were removed from the official list of ethnic minorities. During this period, the manea vanished from public performance but continued to circulate within Romani communities of southern Romania as part of the lăutar repertoire, occasionally performed at weddings as a women’s dance. In this context, the manea became increasingly tied to Romani culture—much like the čoček dance in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria15—and the düyek rhythm emerged as the dominant form.

The only traces of manele from the early communist period are found in unpublished field recordings made by researchers from the Folklore Institute in Bucharest (now the Constantin Brăiloiu Institute of Ethnography and Folklore)— among them the remarkable “Maneaua Romilor” (The Manea of the Roma) performed by accordionist and singer Victor Gore16 in 1959. Combining the düyek rhythm with lyrics, it stands as the earliest recording of what we might call a “modern manea.”

Uite, mamă, un țigan
îmbrăcat milițian.
Și să-l vezi, mamă, să-l vezi,
Că-ți vine să-nebunești.
Poartă costum bleumarin
Și pantofi de moccasin.

Aide da, Aide da, semințe prăjite!
Aide da, Aide da, bomboane umplute!
Look, mama, a Gypsy
Dressed as a policeman.
And if you saw him, mama,
You’d nearly go crazy.
He’s wearing a navy blue suit
And moccasin shoes.

Come yes, Come yes, roasted seeds!
Come yes, Come yes, stuffed candies!
Gore’s manea lampoons the widespread assimilation of Roma that occurred during the first decade of communism, mocking the absurdity of the still-marginalised “Gypsy” dressed in symbols of state power. Around this period, Folklore Institute researchers documented this same melody in Roma communities across southern Romania, suggesting Gore didn’t compose it but drew on a song already circulating widely. The archival examples cited below demonstrate that for Roma, the manea functioned not only as a medium of playful transgression but also as a creative outlet for lamenting economic hardship and the injustices of collectivisation.


Note: the excerpts in this audio montage are separated by an audible tone.
Nadia Văduva, age 19, in Turnu Măgurele (1965):

Na ćumide-m and-o drom-ă,
Kă dikhăl-ma murro rrom-ă.
Na ćumide-m and-e poarta,
Kă dikhăl-ma murrî soacra,
Na ćumide-m and-e poarta,
Kă dikhăl-ma murrî soacra.

Hai lai-la-la…

Ce să ne mai facem, vere?
S-a scumpit halba de bere.
De la doi lei la cinci lei,
Banii de unde să-i iei?
Să lucrez pe șantier
Să-ți iau car și sifonier.
Să-ți fac casă mobilată
Să nu mai sam bagaboantă
Să-ți fac casă mobilată
Să nu mai sam bagaboantă
Don’t kiss me out in the street,
For my husband will see me.
Don’t kiss me at the gate,
For my mother-in-law will see me,
Don’t kiss me at the gate,
For my mother-in-law will see me.[19]

Hai la-la-la…

What can we do now, cousin dear?
Since they raised the price of beer.
From two lei up to five lei,
How are we supposed to pay?
I’ll join a construction crew,
I’ll buy you a wardrobe and a wagon too.
You’ll have a house with furniture,
You won’t roam the streets no more.
You’ll have a house with furniture,
You won’t roam the streets no more.
Gheorghița Moțoi, age 17, and Elena Frunză, age 16, in Teleorman county (1966):

Ai, țiganii de la Buzești-i,
Au plecat la București-i,
Să ia pâinea cu [doi] lei-i,
Și-acolo o dă cu trei-i,
Să ia pâinea cu doi lei-i,
Și-acolo o dă cu trei-i
Fir-ar a dracu ORACA,
Mi-a mâncat banii și vaca.
Și porcu de la Crăciun-î,
Care era cel mai bun-î.

Oh, the Gypsies from Buzești
Have gone to Bucharest.
They buy bread for two lei
And they sell it there for three.
They buy bread for two lei
And they sell it there for three.
To hell with the ORACA,*
It ate my cash and my cow.
And even took my Christmas pig,
The finest one, so fat and big.
*ORACA: Regional Office for the Aquisition and Collection of Animals (Oficiul Regional de Achizitii si Colectare Animale), responsible for the forced requisitioning of farmers’ “excess” products during collectivization.
Maria Costache, age 40, in Călărași county (1966):

La la lai lai…

Cât am fost eu militar
Tu te-ai dat particular.

Bag’ în ea, bag’ în ea,
Motorina pe șosea,
Că e tânără și vrea!
Dita-redl-dau
La la lai lai…

When I was military-bound,
You were out messing around.

Give it to her, give it to her,
Hit the gas and don’t be slow,
Cuz she’s young and wants to go!
Dita-redl-dau
No longer “The Turkish manea,” but rather “The Manea,” this melody became a staple of Romani weddings. Marin “Țagoi” Sandu, a lăutar singer and accordionist from Clejani, told me that “there was only one melody that we called manea; people would request it, saying ‘play me the manea.’”

Victor Gore recorded the same melody in 1966 under the title “Maneaua florăreselor” (The Manea of the [Romani] Florist Women)—this time omitting the lyrics and thereby neutralizing its political implications—making it the first manea released under communism. Gore’s manea is just one example of a subversive “underground” musical text crossing over into the highly regulated sphere of official culture. Thus, for listeners familiar with the original privately-circulating text—what Anthropologist James C. Scott calls the “hidden transcript”, the song maintains its subversive power even in the “clean” state-sanctioned version.18

Between 1966 and 1989, only a small number of manele recordings (songs with the turcească rhythm) appeared on state-approved media, issued by Electrecord or aired on national television (TVR), performed by prominent lăutari such as Victor Gore (accordion), Romina Puceanu (vocals), Gabi Luncă (vocals), and Ion Onoriu (accordion).
Cassette tape vendor near University Square in Bucharest, 1993. Photo by Norihiro Haruta
Cassette tape vendor near University Square in Bucharest, 1993. Photo by Norihiro Haruta

The rise of muzică orientală

By the early 1980s, Ceaușescu’s austerity policies had plunged the country into hardship—living standards fell, food ran short, and gas and electricity were rationed. Blue jeans, tape recorders, and foreign cassettes became coveted black-market treasures often obtained through Romanians working abroad. Tapes of Arabic, Turkish, Mizrahi-Israeli, and Greek pop songs set to the düyek rhythm circulated widely as muzică orientală (“Oriental music”), inspiring bands of young Romanians to cover them—either by mimicking the foreign lyrics phonetically or adding new Romanian ones.

While the turcească remained the domain of professional lăutari within Roma communities, the rhythmically identical muzică orientală belonged to an amateur “party music” scene dominated by ethnic Romanians. Centered in youth discos and bars, orientală was performed alongside Western pop (muzică ușoară) and folklore (muzică populară). In contrast to the traditional instrumentation of the lăutar taraf, groups such as Azur (Brăila), Odeon (Buzău), Miorița (Constanța), Miracol C (Buzău), and Generic (Târgoviște) favoured electric guitars, keyboards, and drum kits. Bootleg reel-to-reel tapes of these bands performing live quickly found their way onto the black market, fuelling the genre’s growing underground popularity.
Dan Armeanca Performing at the “Romane Dyvesa” (Romani Days) festival in Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland, 1992.
Dan Armeanca Performing at the “Romane Dyvesa” (Romani Days) festival in Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland, 1992.

Dan Armeanca and the emergence of manele as a Romani genre

Muzică orientală may have developed largely outside Romani musical circles, but it was guitarist and singer Dan Armeanca—a musician shaped by muzică ușoară and rooted in the lăutar tradition—who became the key figure linking the two worlds. By adapting pop aesthetics to a Romani-language repertoire, he provided the model through which lăutari would soon enter the orientală scene, transforming it into what became known as manele.

Born in 1961 into a large Romani-speaking family of Ursari in rural Dâmbovița County, Armeanca grew up learning guitar from his older brother, Raj, and was already performing at village weddings by his teens. In 1980 he moved to Bucharest to work as a lathe operator at the 23 August pipe factory, where, at just nineteen, he was tapped to lead the factory’s pop ensemble Meteor.19 At the same time, he played weddings with colleagues from the factory band and began experimenting with his own approach to muzică orientală. Armeanca recalls:

We played muzică ușoară, pop. But in parallel I was trying to make a new musical style. I was working on it alone at home and I didn’t have people to back me up. But I listened to a lot of muzică orientală. […] My whole family was working in construction, and they were on contracts abroad in Arab countries back then: Libya, Egypt, Iraq. And we had cassettes [from those countries]. I listened to them all the time and it started to grow on me. I began combining what I’d been studying with a modern sound.20

You couldn’t find cassettes [in Romania at the time]. You weren’t even allowed to play international music at a restaurant. But at weddings, when we’d finished [the ușoară set], we played all the styles: Serbian, Romani, Bulgarian. But we modified them, we brought them to a new level. […] Even if the lyrics stayed the same, I would modify the harmonies to make it our own so it would have our personality […] to not be a one-to-one copy.21
Armeanca told me that his decision to sing in Romani—a language unrecognized under communism and therefore effectively banned—was not politically driven, but inspired by the poetic and sonic qualities of his mother tongue.

Often when you sing a song, it sounds better thanks to the words in our [Romani] language. It sounds more mișto than in Romanian. Often the consonants and vowels don’t sound right in these lyrics [in Romanian], understand? But if you sing it in țigănește, it has more charm thanks to the language.

It wasn’t a political message. I mean just because you sang in your native tongue it was a political message? No, it wasn’t. But that’s how the laws were—you weren’t even allowed to speak it in a streetcar, so of course you were afraid to sing in țigănește. But at weddings we could get away with it. They’d put up a tent for 200-300 people and we’d perform in their yard, on their street.

The president of the big [factory workers’] union liked me, of course. He’d say “Armeanca, sing me one of your songs in țigănește,” and I’d sing. It was forbidden but I played whatever he wanted. […] I worked hard for this success, nobody gave it to me. I was holed up in the factory club [rehearsing] with those guys for two years. We didn’t even have cigarettes, and we’d smoke what was left on the ground by the workers. I laugh now, yeah. But within two years [by 1984] we had cars, money, everything we could want.22
Romania’s violent revolution of 1989 brought an end to 42 years of communist rule, ushering in the official recognition of the Romani minority and the disappearance of state censorship. Suddenly, music that had remained almost entirely underground and out of public view was audible in bars, parks, and concert halls. Foreign products poured into the country, and bootleg tapes gave way to a cottage industry of cassette production by countless new home studios.

The renewed visibility of Romani identity in public life after 1989 led to the formation of new political parties and NGOs, as well as large-scale concerts featuring Romani artists, such as Super Vedetele Romilor (“Romani Superstars”) and Gypsy Star in 1990. These events brought together established lăutari like Romica Puceanu, Gabi Luncă, and Florică Roșioru with a younger generation of performers who were blending traditional sounds with the muzică orientală style that had flourished in the 1980s.

A pivotal figure in this transition was Dan Armeanca, whose 1992 album Chileá Romane (Romani Songs)—the first Romani-language LP in Romania’s history—symbolized the post-socialist cultural awakening and marked the shift from Romanian-dominated muzică orientală to a new manele sound led by Romani artists. Combining clarinet and vocals with the electric guitar, synthesizer, bass guitar, drum kit, and concert toms, Armeanca crafted a modern hybrid style that deeply influenced younger lăutari, many of whom left traditional muzică lăutărească for the rapidly expanding manele market. Among them was Adrian Simionescu (Adi Minune), who made his debut at Super Vedetele Romilor at age 16 and would become one of the genre’s biggest stars by decade’s end, performing first with acoustic ensembles and later with the electroacoustic bands of Dan Armeanca, Vali Vijelie, Dan Bursuc, and others.

Conclusions

As the 1990s gave way to the new millennium, the manea completed its long journey from the margins to the mainstream. Once confined to backyards and wedding tents, it now blasted from car stereos and festival stages. Whether loved or despised, manele had become an essential part of contemporary Romanian culture, and rhythms that once marked otherness began to sound unmistakably like home.

Across a century of reinvention, the manea has mediated Romania’s shifting boundaries between East and West, majority and minority, center and margin, continually adapting to new worlds and new meanings. Each reinvention—whether as a dance tune, a subversive satire, or a pop anthem—reveals how music can outlast the boundaries imposed by politics, class, and taste.

Today, manele rhythms pulse through weddings, festivals, and streaming platforms, far removed from the moral panics that once surrounded them. Yet beneath the synthesizers and Auto-Tune, echoes of older worlds remain: the cries of the street vendors, the wedding tents of the 1960s, the factory clubs of the 1980s, the cassette stalls of the 1990s. To listen closely is to hear a century of adaptation and survival rendered in sound.

  1. See Beissinger, Rădulescu and Giurchescu 2016; Rusu 2024; Breazu and Lukács 2020.↩︎
  2. Russo 1910:40.↩︎
  3. Ibid. 9.↩︎/li>
  4. Ivela 1927:127.↩︎
  5. Demetrescu 1892:33.↩︎
  6. “Dela Expoziție,” 1906.↩︎
  7. Barbu 1922:70.↩︎
  8. Cazaban 1909:1.↩︎
  9. Bucuța 1931:495.↩︎
  10. Artun 2000:222.↩︎
  11. Teodorescu 1885:121.↩︎
  12. In the video linked here, the listeners laugh with delight as the singer improvises a personalized mânî that integrates their names into his rhyming verse. This phenomenon is similar to the improvised dedications that some contemporary lăutari offer their patrons.↩︎
  13. Also known as tsiftetelli in Greek and maqsum in Arabic.↩︎
  14. There are, however, many earlier recordings of Romanian-born Jewish klezmorim (wedding musicians) like Joseph Moskowitz (b. 1879 Galați) and Max Yankowitz (b.1875 Bacău) performing pieces in the terkisher rhythm.↩︎
  15. See Silverman 2012:27-28; Seeman 2019:309.↩︎
  16. Born Victor Ion Dima (1931-2008), he was the son of celebrated violinist Gore Ionescu.↩︎
  17. Similar couplets appear frequently in Cântece țigănești (Gypsy Songs, 1878), compiled by early Romanian folklorist Barbu Constantinescu.↩︎
  18. See Scott 1990.↩︎
  19. All large factories had at least one band by that time in order to compete in the annual Cîntarea României (Song of Praise to Romania) nationwide talent show.↩︎
  20. Rusu 2016.↩︎
  21. Armeanca, Dan. Personal Interview, Montréal (by telephone), March 11, 2025.↩︎
  22. Ibid.↩︎

    *I would like to thank Andrei Anastasescu, Denisa Badea, Şükrü Alp Beyarslan, and Nicolae Clopotar for help with translations, and Cosmo for his advice on Turkish rhythms. Alex Corneanu, Andrei Tănăsescu, and Axel Weggen generously provided historical recordings and discographical information for this publication. This research was enriched by discussions with the following musicians: Dan Armeanca, Sorin “Necunoscutu” Cobzaru, Leonard Iordache, Costel Nechita, and Marin “Țagoi” Sandu.

    Further Reading:


  1. ANF (Romanian National Film Archive). 1956. “Actualitatea în imagini No. 6/1956, ‘Din țară’”. Online at Culturalia.
  2. Artun, Erman. 2000. Adana Halk Kültürü Araştırmaları 1. Adana: Adana Büyük Şehir Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları.
  3. Barbu, Ion. 1922. “Selim”. Viaţa Romînească, Year 14, nr. 1, pp. 70-74.
  4. Beissinger, Margaret H. 2007. “Muzică Orientală: Identity and Popular Culture in Postcommunist Romania.” In Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse, edited by Donna A. Buchanan, 95-142. Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
  5. Beissinger, Margaret H., Speranța Rădulescu, and Anca Giurchescu, eds. 2016. Manele in Romania: Cultural Expression and Social Meaning in Balkan Popular Music. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
  6. Breazu, Paul and Mihai Lukács. 2020. “On the Manelization of Romania in Identitarian Times”. The Attic.
  7. Bucuța, Emanoil. 1931. “Cronica”. Boabe de grâu, Oct-Nov 1931 (Year 2, No.10-11), 484-496. Bucharest: Educație Poporului.
  8. Cazaban, Alexandru. 1909. “Deșteaptă-te, Romîne!”. Dimineaţa, 18 March 1909 (Year 6, Nr. 1824), p.1-2.
  9. Constantinescu, Barbu. 2016 [1878]. Cântece țigănești, Critical edition. Bucharest: Editura Muzeul Literaturii Române.
  10. “Dela Expoziția din Milano”. Universul, 5 November, 1906 (Year 24, Nr. 304), p.3.
  11. Demetrescu, Traian. 1892/1983. Intim. Craiova: Scrisul Românesc.
  12. Haliliuc, Alina. 2015. “Manele Music and the Discourse of Balkanism in Romania.” Communication, Culture & Critique 8 (2): 290-308.
  13. Ivela, A. L. 1927. Dicționar muzical ilustrat. Bucharest: Editura Librariei “Universala” Alcalay and Co.
  14. “În fața microfonului românesc”. Radio şi Radiofonia, December 20, 1931 (Year 4, Nr. 170), p.28.
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  17. Rusu, Dragoș. 2016. “Am Vorbit Cu Dan Armeanca, Artistul Care a Inventat Manelele Pe Vremea Lui Ceaușescu.” VICE, June 9, 2016.
  18. Rusu, Dragoș. 2024. Reflections on the Past and the Present of Manele Music in Romania. Easterndaze
  19. Seeman, Sonia Tamar. 2019. Sounding Roman: Representation and Performing Identity in Western Turkey. New York: Oxford University Press.
  20. Silverman, Carol. 2012. Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora. American Musicspheres. New York: Oxford University Press.
  21. Teodorescu, G. Dem. 1885. Poesii Populare Române. Bucharest: Tipografia Modernă.


*This article is part of the project The Sonic Turn, co-financed by AFCN. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or the way its results may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding beneficiary.
About the Author

Shaun Williams

Shaun Williams is an ethnomusicologist and musician based in Bucharest. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research in Eastern Europe, his work is focused on minority rights and traditional music under state socialism and post-socialist transition.

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