This prestigious anthropological museum invites both the Bucharest public and international audiences, in person and online, to explore Romanian and other European masks through the lenses of craftsmanship and rituality.
The Romanian institution has organized a mini-series of interactive lectures featuring invited speakers, focusing on ritual and festive universes as well as mask-making practices. The series is held in connection with the museum’s participation in the European project “MASKS EU: Unveiling the Art and Craft Behind Masks.” In previous editions, the public was invited into the workshops of several mascagi (traditional mask makers) in Romania. This year, however, the focus is on international masks and, specifically, on the coordinators of the partner organizations involved in the project.
In the fourth session of the series, Pilar Panero, Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and serves as the driving force and coordinator of the European MASKS project. She presented the ritual density of several of our winter festivities.
The lecture offered a journey through the traces of masked groups in the province of Zamora, closely examining the winter custom of the Zangarrón of Montamarta—one of the most complex masked ceremonies in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, celebrated on New Year’s Day and Epiphany. The lecture and subsequent discussion were grounded in extensive fieldwork, documentary analysis, the historical evolution of the tradition, and the transformations over time of its central figure (the Zangarrón mask), alongside shifting contexts and new organizational frameworks promoted by the local community.
The talk was supported by visual materials drawn from the researcher’s fieldwork, which were discussed collectively.
Georgiana Vlahbei (Ethnology Studies, NMRP) acted as moderator and coordinator of the activity.
